Reviews: A Short History of Nearly Everything: Notes from a small planet

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Doubleday, GBP 20

I’m a sceptic about science, myself. Like Jade in Big Brother – who thought Cambridge was located in London, and East Anglia somewhere “abroad” – I can see that there are generally agreed facts about the physical world out there without feeling any obligation to make a note of them. Everybody knows scientists are strange people, after all, hanging about laboratories or digging up dry river beds in New South Wales. And on most days of the week, might East Anglia not as well be abroad?

So it’s with surprise, as well as pleasure, that I must report that Bill Bryson has written the science book for me. Just as it seemed that pop science was bottoming out after the publication of “The Adventures of Jimmy Praseodymium” and “Close-Up Tricks With Isotope Geochemistry”, here comes the well-liked American with a journalistic survey of four centuries of scientific endeavour which is lucid, thoughtful and, above all, entertaining.

And a giddy ride it is, too. Here be dragons, the birth of the universe, the secret life of a human cell and two strong contenders for the title of Best Thought Ever Thought (Open Category): Darwin on natural selection and Einstein on relativity. Here are marvellous set pieces which evoke wonder and not a little apprehension: a major volcanic incident, say, or the entirely surprising and dramatic landscape within a cell, or the grimly imagined consequences of a substantial meteor strike in the Midwest.

And if facts are your thing there are facts galore – 423 pages of them, to be exact, and I confidently predict that you will find some of them to your liking. These are some of my favourites: the smoky sunsets of Turner’s paintings were a happy by-product of a huge volcanic explosion in Indonesia in 1815; the discoverer of Uranus wanted the planet to be called George, but was overruled; the feverish fashion for reassembling dinosaur bones in 18th century America was fuelled by French slanders about the New World’s lack of virility; and according to Darwin (who loved exactitude) the total number of worms to be found in an acre of English soil was 53,767.

But I’m afraid you will find little in these pages to disabuse you of the idea that scientists are strange people. Bill Bryson is generous in allowing his narrative to be hijacked by personalities like the Reverend Robert Evans, who from his sun-deck in the Blue Mountains of Australia has identified 36 dying stars, or Dr James Parkinson, the revolutionary socialist and would-be regicide whose studies led to the naming of Parkinson’s Disease, and who won a natural history museum in a raffle. It is instructive to read, incidentally, that the Nobel-winning discoverers of the structure of DNA had apparently planned to succeed “by doing as little work as possible beyond thinking, and no more of that than was absolutely necessary”.

In a sense the real theme of this whirlwind tour through the world of science is the drama of research, and this is a theatre with no shortage of out-and-out villains. Bryson provides a grim litany of destroyers who have wiped out earthly species, often in the name of science, or fame, or unfathomable affection for their victims. But he reserves a special place for the pantomime-bad Thomas Midgely. It was this Ohio unfortunate who invented the idea of putting poisonous lead in petrol and ozone-destroying CFCs in virtually everything else (and whose companies continue to peddle his noxious wares long after he became fatally entangled in one of his less-profitable inventions.)

In fact, there’s something about the technicalities of science which seems to bring out the dark side of Bryson’s imagination. And this is not a writer to fight shy of academia’s bitching and in- fighting, misattributed Nobel Prizes and other shenanigans. It can be gory stuff, I’m pleased to say, and the American is a surefooted guide to scientific battlefields strewn with the bodies of unlucky, mistreated and forgotten talents, turning over the corpses with admirable revisionist zeal.

And it is a certainty that the revision will be never-ending. Who knows what icons of our current scientific orthodoxy will one day languish in the museum of laughable nonsense alongside alchemy, phlogiston and luminiferous ether?

Still, every so often through the years, scientists get so overwhelmingly pleased with themselves that they start to announce that they have investigated matters, and are happy to declare that they now understand pretty nearly everything.

So it’s a great relief to find that Bryson is unusually and admirably sensitive not only to the body of knowledge about what has been discovered, but also to the great, mysterious (and I suspect infinite) unknown. Vast expanses of ignorance surround the tortuous enigma of how cells work, or mental processes, or anything much to do with what is going on inside the Earth (and things are going on in there, like the curious occasional reversal of the planet’s magnetic field).

In some areas of science – such as the ongoing discoveries of new hominoidal fossil types – fresh evidence only serves to increase the experts’ confusion. Even the mapping of the human genome, which has become emblematic of the ultimate scientific achievement, actually looks now more like a precursor to the hugely more complex mapping of the “proteome”, the system of proteins which are the active agents within cells. And nobody has any idea how to do that at all.

As I said, it’s a giddy trip, excitedly criss-crossing the planet, inner and outer space – but then you could say that Bryson’s humour has always been in transit. From Africa to Australia, the backwoods of the United States to his sometime British home, he has travelled the world for his wry journalese – and along the way set the bedrock for that modern genre of travel writing which is more interested in the midge on the writer’s nose than the exotic spots on his map. But we mustn’t hold that against him. Notes from a Small Island was recently voted the book which best represents modern England (with some justification), and Bryson’s personal, and occasionally whimsical, explorations have always been underpinned by research nuggets, astute observation and clear-sighted analysis. Just the sort of things, in fact, to make a really worthwhile pop science book.

And really, the man could make a decent read of a telephone directory. Whatever the passing frivolities – the most regrettable of which is probably this book’s tired title – this is writing which is serious in design. The storytelling instinct is unerring, and the language is so comfortably assured that it makes the occasional pedantry and lapses into “Wow! Science” entirely forgivable.

I don’t know where else you would come closer to getting anything intelligible out of the General Theory of Relativity, and even if atomic physics defeats Bryson, it’s not entirely surprising in a field many of whose most distinguished practitioners have been heard to pronounce themselves confused. (With superstring theory, Bryson wisely beats a hasty retreat: “anything scientists say about the theory begins to sound worryingly like the sort of thoughts that would make you edge away if conveyed to you by a stranger on a park bench.”)

So there is much to be pleasurably learnt, and where the ground is over-familiar but unavoidable – Darwin and the Beagle, say – Bryson is careful to landscape it with novel diversions (in Darwin’s case these include the information that the principles of natural selection had been published 20 years ahead of the Englishman by a Scottish gardener, Patrick Mathew, though, unfortunately, in an appendix to an article in Naval Timber and Arboriculture, which was not a bestseller).

But maybe it’s time for Mathew to have his due at last. There will be scientists who will take issue with Bryson’s conclusions and omissions, and critics who will chafe at his good humour, and in- between the two of them I wouldn’t be surprised if A Short History… does go on to bestsellerdom. In a world where, as the writer himself observes, a lot of people don’t know anything and nobody knows everything, we need all the Brysons we can get.