Science, Discovery, and Mystery Theme Analysis

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, author Bill Bryson claims that scientists often believe they have figured out all there is to know about a particular topic before realizing they are wrong. Most scientific discoveries, in fact, imply that we only know a tiny fraction of what there is to know, which prompts Bryson to conclude that the more humans learn—about the universe, life on Earth, and the planet itself—the more we realize how little we know. The scientific endeavor, thus, is only in its infancy. Bryson suggests that the universe is fraught with countless mysteries that take generations to solve. Such mysteries will likely occupy scientists for as long humans exist, meaning there will always be a need for scientific discovery.

Bryson emphasizes that humans have only discovered a fraction of the physical components of our world, which means that the project of scientific discovery is only just getting started. Bryson argues that geological scientists are only at the beginning of their journey because scientists know “very little” about what goes on underneath Earth’s crust, and most of their assumptions about Earth’s interior continue to be proven false as more discoveries are made. Bryson explains that thus far, humans have only been able to penetrate 12,262 meters (approximately 12 kilometers) into Earth’s crust, which scientists estimate is up to 70 kilometers deep. So far, most of their findings have been highly surprising, such as the discovery of waterlogged material far below the surface, which was previously assumed to be impossible. What’s more, Earth’s crust itself only comprises 0.3 percent of Earth’s volume, meaning that “if the planet were an apple, we wouldn’t yet have broken the skin” and that nearly all of what scientists assume about Earth’s interior is vague guesswork. Effectively, scientists have—both literally and metaphorically—barely scratched the surface of what there is to know about the planet humans call home.

Similarly, in biology, the discovery in 1977 of 10-foot-long worms on the Pacific Ocean’s floor that survive by “chemosynthesis” (meaning they derive energy not from oxygen, but from hydrogen sulfides, which are toxic to all other known creatures) revolutionized biologists’ basic assumptions about the fundamental requirements for an environment that can foster life. Bryson emphasizes that parts of the ocean (like the Mariana Trench) descend far below the depths where chemosynthesizing worms were discovered, implying that further deep ocean exploration could yield countless surprising discoveries. Oceanographers similarly suggest that “there could be as many as thirty million species of animals in the sea, most still undiscovered,” while biologists estimate that overall, only 3 percent of the world’s plants and animals have been discovered so far, leading Bryson to conclude that when it comes to biology, “there is a great deal we [still] don’t know.”

Apart from all the animal and plant species currently living on Earth, scientists also estimate that there have been five large-scale extinctions on Earth, wiping out over 95 percent of species that have lived in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year existence. This means that scientists know even less about life on Earth when the broader geological scale of Earth’s history is considered. Even when it comes to the human species, scientists have only just begun to understand what makes up our own biology. The human genome—comprised of 40,000 or so human genes—was only fully mapped in 2003. The human genome, however, “tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work,” which is now prompting scientists to map “proteomes” (a new concept capturing the genetic information that creates proteins). Bryson concludes that genetic research, too, is only in its infancy. 

Bryson also argues that whenever scientists conclude that they have “pinned down most of the mysteries of the physical world,” they inevitably discover that the deeper they look, the less they know, meaning the scientist’s work is never—and probably will never be—done. For example, despite being advised not to pursue physics as a graduate student “because the breakthroughs [have] already been made,” Max Planck revolutionized theoretical physics with his formulation of quantum theory in 1900 by showing that gravitational laws don’t apply at the subatomic level. Planck’s theory prompted subsequent research into the laws governing particles, which itself reveals highly counter-intuitive insights about the subatomic world and shows that humans know very little about the fundamental particles that make up our universe. For example, scientists have made the puzzling discovery that the movement of a subatomic particle in one place instantaneously triggers the movement of its “sister particle” elsewhere. This might imply that the distant universe is a reflection of sorts rather than an actual place. Subatomic particles might also be made of layers upon layers of smaller particles, implying that they could potentially contain entire universes of their own, about which nothing might ever be known. Superstring physicists now posit 11 dimensions (seven of which are, as yet, unknowable to humans), while astronomers suggest that 99 percent of the universe is comprised of invisible “dark matter,” about which very little, if anything, is known at all. Such hypotheses prompt Bryson to conclude that even the most advanced theoretical scientists acknowledge that most of the universe is “beyond us,” meaning there is so much more to discover. In short, Bryson argues that despite what humans think we know, there is always a new discovery lurking around the corner that might be game-changing. The universe is full of mysteries—so many, in fact, that “we really are at the beginning of it all.” Scientific discovery still has a very long way to go.