A Short History of Nearly Everything

by

Bill Bryson

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on A Short History of Nearly Everything makes teaching easy.

Bill Bryson Character Analysis

Bryson is the author and sole narrator of the story. Bryson feels that he knows very little about science, primarily because he found science textbooks so dull and technical as a child. To remedy this, he starts learning about the history of scientific discovery because he’s curious about how scientists come to know what they know. The result is the narrative he tells in A Short History of Everything. In the book, Bryson explores scientific discovery in a range of scientific areas, but especially in physics, biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology, astronomy, oceanography, and paleontology. To make this story more engaging for laypeople, Bryson invokes frequent humorous biographical anecdotes about the scientists he addresses, and he avoids technical jargon, favoring visual metaphors instead. His aim is to show that scientific discovery is in its very early stages (despite how often scientists declare otherwise), as well as to show that clear, accessible expression and classification are essential to the scientific endeavor. Bryson also aims to demonstrate how scientific progress is hindered by prejudices like patriarchal values and religious biases. Ultimately, Bryson wants the reader to understand that life is a rare, precious, and precarious thing that is worthy of awe, profound respect, and care.

Bill Bryson Quotes in A Short History of Nearly Everything

The A Short History of Nearly Everything quotes below are all either spoken by Bill Bryson or refer to Bill Bryson. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Science, Discovery, and Mystery Theme Icon
).
Introduction Quotes

To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 2-3
Explanation and Analysis:

I didn’t doubt the correctness of the information for an instant—I still tend to trust the pronouncements of scientists in the way I trust those of surgeons, plumbers, and other possessors of arcane and privileged information—but I couldn’t for the life of me conceive how any human mind could work out what spaces thousands of miles below us, that no eye had ever seen and no X-ray could penetrate, could look like and be made of.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

And here’s the thing. It wasn’t exciting at all. It wasn’t actually altogether comprehensible.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

We have been spoiled by artists’ renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution that doesn’t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy’s photograph is faint and fuzz—a piece of cosmic lint—and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crispy delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), James Christy
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:

When I was a boy, the solar system was thought to contain thirty moons. The total now is “at least ninety,” about a third of which have been found in just the last ten years. The point to remember, of course, is that when considering the universe at large, we don’t actually know what’s in our own solar system.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Nearly every line he penned was an invitation to slumber.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), James Hutton
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Perhaps nothing better typifies the strange and often accidental nature of chemical science in its early days than a discovery made by a German named Henning Brand in 1675. Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine […] None of it yielded gold, of course, but a strange and interesting thing did happen. After a time, the substance began to glow. Moreover, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously burst into flame.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Henning Brand
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:

Marie Curie would win a second prize, in chemistry, in 1911, the only person to win in both chemistry and physics.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Marie Curie
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Just to put these insights into perspective, it is perhaps worth noting that at the time Leavitt [was] inferring fundamental properties of the cosmos from dim smudges on photographic plates, the Harvard astronomer William H. Pickering, who could of course peer into a first class telescope as often as he wanted, was developing his seminal theory that dark patches on the Moon were caused by swarms of seasonally migrating insects.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Henrietta Swan Leavitt , Edwin Hubble
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

The “shell” of an atom isn’t some hard shiny casing, as illustrations sometimes encourage us to suppose, but simply the outermost of these fuzzy electron clouds. The cloud itself is essentially just a zone of statistical probability beyond which the electron only very seldom strays. […] It seemed as if there was no end of strangeness.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Niels Bohr , Werner Heisenberg
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:

Einstein couldn’t bear the notion that God could create a universe in which some things were forever unknowable.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Max Planck , Albert Einstein
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Seldom has an industrial product been more swiftly or unfortunately embraced. CFCs went into production in the early 1930s and found a thousand applications in everything from car air conditioners to deodorant sprays before it was noticed, half a century later, that they were devouring the ozone in the stratosphere. As you will be aware, this is not a good thing.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Robert Midgley Jr.
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Carl Sagan in Cosmos raised the possibility that if you traveled downward into an electron, you might find that it contained a universe of its own, recalling all those science fiction stories of the fifties.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Carl Sagan
Page Number: 164
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

Think of Earth’s orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is regularly crossed by pedestrians who don’t know enough to look before stepping off the curb. At least 90 percent of these pedestrians are quite unknown to us. […] All we know is that at some point, at uncertain levels, they trundle across the road down which we are cruising at sixty-six thousand miles per hour. […] The number of these relative tiddlers in Earth crossing orbits is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions, and they are nearly impossible to track.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Eugene Shoemaker , David Levy
Related Symbols: Freeway
Page Number: 193-194
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

Yellowstone, it appears, is due.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

The real terror of the deep, however is the bends—not so much because they are unpleasant, though of course they are, as because they are so much more likely.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

It was a world independent of sunlight, oxygen, or anything else normally associated with life. This was a living system based not on photosynthesis, but chemosynthesis, an arrangement that biologists would have dismissed as preposterous had anyone been imaginative enough to suggest it.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 279
Explanation and Analysis:

In fact, by 1957-58 the dumping of radioactive wastes had already been going on, with a certain appalling vigor, for over a decade.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

Remarkably, by one estimate, some 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the developed world are given to farm animals, often routinely in stock feed, simply to promote growth or as a precaution against infection. Such applications give bacteria every opportunity to evolve a resistance to them.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 315
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Darwin kept his theory to himself because he well knew the storm it would cause. In 1844, the year he locked his notes away, a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation roused much of the thinking world to fury by suggesting that humans might have evolved from lesser primates without the assistance of a divine creator.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Charles Darwin
Page Number: 386
Explanation and Analysis:

And these, you may recall, are men who thought science was nearly at an end.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Charles Darwin , Gregor Mendel
Page Number: 396
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

If Franklin was not warmly forthcoming with her findings, she cannot altogether be blamed. Female academics at King’s in the 1950s were treated with a formalized disdain that dazzles modern sensibilities (actually any sensibilities). However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college’s senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber that even Watson conceded was “dingily pokey.” On top of this she was being constantly pressed—at times actively harassed—to share her results with a trio of men whose desperation to get a peek at them was seldom matched by more engaging qualities, like respect.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, James Watson
Page Number: 405
Explanation and Analysis:

Perhaps an apogee (or nadir) of this faith in biodeterminism was a study published in the journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics. In fact, we now know, almost nothing about you is so accommodatingly simple.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 412
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27 Quotes

The extraordinary fact is that we don’t know which is more likely, a future offering us eons of perishing frigidity or one giving us equal expanses of steamy heat. Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife-edge.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), James Croll, Milutin Milankovitch, Wladimir Köppen
Page Number: 432
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 30 Quotes

We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 478
Explanation and Analysis:
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Bill Bryson Quotes in A Short History of Nearly Everything

The A Short History of Nearly Everything quotes below are all either spoken by Bill Bryson or refer to Bill Bryson. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Science, Discovery, and Mystery Theme Icon
).
Introduction Quotes

To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 2-3
Explanation and Analysis:

I didn’t doubt the correctness of the information for an instant—I still tend to trust the pronouncements of scientists in the way I trust those of surgeons, plumbers, and other possessors of arcane and privileged information—but I couldn’t for the life of me conceive how any human mind could work out what spaces thousands of miles below us, that no eye had ever seen and no X-ray could penetrate, could look like and be made of.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

And here’s the thing. It wasn’t exciting at all. It wasn’t actually altogether comprehensible.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

We have been spoiled by artists’ renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution that doesn’t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy’s photograph is faint and fuzz—a piece of cosmic lint—and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crispy delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), James Christy
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:

When I was a boy, the solar system was thought to contain thirty moons. The total now is “at least ninety,” about a third of which have been found in just the last ten years. The point to remember, of course, is that when considering the universe at large, we don’t actually know what’s in our own solar system.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Nearly every line he penned was an invitation to slumber.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), James Hutton
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Perhaps nothing better typifies the strange and often accidental nature of chemical science in its early days than a discovery made by a German named Henning Brand in 1675. Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine […] None of it yielded gold, of course, but a strange and interesting thing did happen. After a time, the substance began to glow. Moreover, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously burst into flame.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Henning Brand
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:

Marie Curie would win a second prize, in chemistry, in 1911, the only person to win in both chemistry and physics.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Marie Curie
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Just to put these insights into perspective, it is perhaps worth noting that at the time Leavitt [was] inferring fundamental properties of the cosmos from dim smudges on photographic plates, the Harvard astronomer William H. Pickering, who could of course peer into a first class telescope as often as he wanted, was developing his seminal theory that dark patches on the Moon were caused by swarms of seasonally migrating insects.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Henrietta Swan Leavitt , Edwin Hubble
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

The “shell” of an atom isn’t some hard shiny casing, as illustrations sometimes encourage us to suppose, but simply the outermost of these fuzzy electron clouds. The cloud itself is essentially just a zone of statistical probability beyond which the electron only very seldom strays. […] It seemed as if there was no end of strangeness.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Niels Bohr , Werner Heisenberg
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:

Einstein couldn’t bear the notion that God could create a universe in which some things were forever unknowable.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Max Planck , Albert Einstein
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Seldom has an industrial product been more swiftly or unfortunately embraced. CFCs went into production in the early 1930s and found a thousand applications in everything from car air conditioners to deodorant sprays before it was noticed, half a century later, that they were devouring the ozone in the stratosphere. As you will be aware, this is not a good thing.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Robert Midgley Jr.
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Carl Sagan in Cosmos raised the possibility that if you traveled downward into an electron, you might find that it contained a universe of its own, recalling all those science fiction stories of the fifties.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Carl Sagan
Page Number: 164
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

Think of Earth’s orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is regularly crossed by pedestrians who don’t know enough to look before stepping off the curb. At least 90 percent of these pedestrians are quite unknown to us. […] All we know is that at some point, at uncertain levels, they trundle across the road down which we are cruising at sixty-six thousand miles per hour. […] The number of these relative tiddlers in Earth crossing orbits is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions, and they are nearly impossible to track.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Eugene Shoemaker , David Levy
Related Symbols: Freeway
Page Number: 193-194
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

Yellowstone, it appears, is due.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

The real terror of the deep, however is the bends—not so much because they are unpleasant, though of course they are, as because they are so much more likely.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

It was a world independent of sunlight, oxygen, or anything else normally associated with life. This was a living system based not on photosynthesis, but chemosynthesis, an arrangement that biologists would have dismissed as preposterous had anyone been imaginative enough to suggest it.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 279
Explanation and Analysis:

In fact, by 1957-58 the dumping of radioactive wastes had already been going on, with a certain appalling vigor, for over a decade.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

Remarkably, by one estimate, some 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the developed world are given to farm animals, often routinely in stock feed, simply to promote growth or as a precaution against infection. Such applications give bacteria every opportunity to evolve a resistance to them.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 315
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Darwin kept his theory to himself because he well knew the storm it would cause. In 1844, the year he locked his notes away, a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation roused much of the thinking world to fury by suggesting that humans might have evolved from lesser primates without the assistance of a divine creator.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Charles Darwin
Page Number: 386
Explanation and Analysis:

And these, you may recall, are men who thought science was nearly at an end.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Charles Darwin , Gregor Mendel
Page Number: 396
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

If Franklin was not warmly forthcoming with her findings, she cannot altogether be blamed. Female academics at King’s in the 1950s were treated with a formalized disdain that dazzles modern sensibilities (actually any sensibilities). However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college’s senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber that even Watson conceded was “dingily pokey.” On top of this she was being constantly pressed—at times actively harassed—to share her results with a trio of men whose desperation to get a peek at them was seldom matched by more engaging qualities, like respect.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, James Watson
Page Number: 405
Explanation and Analysis:

Perhaps an apogee (or nadir) of this faith in biodeterminism was a study published in the journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics. In fact, we now know, almost nothing about you is so accommodatingly simple.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 412
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27 Quotes

The extraordinary fact is that we don’t know which is more likely, a future offering us eons of perishing frigidity or one giving us equal expanses of steamy heat. Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife-edge.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker), James Croll, Milutin Milankovitch, Wladimir Köppen
Page Number: 432
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 30 Quotes

We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.

Related Characters: Bill Bryson (speaker)
Page Number: 478
Explanation and Analysis: