A Short History of Nearly Everything

by

Bill Bryson

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Science, Discovery, and Mystery Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Science, Discovery, and Mystery Theme Icon
Writing, Wonder, and Inspiration  Theme Icon
Progress, Sexism, and Dogma Theme Icon
Existence, Awe, and Survival  Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Short History of Nearly Everything, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Discovery, and Mystery Theme Icon

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.

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Science, Discovery, and Mystery Quotes in A Short History of Nearly Everything

Below you will find the important quotes in A Short History of Nearly Everything related to the theme of Science, Discovery, and Mystery.
Introduction Quotes

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:
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 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:
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:
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 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: