Check out my A Short History of Nearly Everything book summary and review  that I created to help you understand the basics of this great book. A short history of almost everything (A short History of Nearly Everything) is a popular science book by Bill Bryson written in 2003, which deals with the history of science from the perspective of how knowledge evolved and provides curious aspects of the life of Their protagonists. 

 

 

 with its greatness, miseries and eccentricities. It manages to capture fundamental concepts of geology, physics and chemistry with ease and simplicity. It was the best-selling popular science book of 2005 in the UK, selling over 300,000 copies.

A Short History of Nearly Everything book summary

A Short History of Nearly Everything is a non-fiction book by Bill Bryson, an American-British science writer, published in New York City in 2003 under the title A Short History of Nearly Everything, which has also been produced as an audio book.

In 30 chapters, Bryson gives an overview of the current state of knowledge in the natural sciences - with a special focus on biology, geology, astronomy and physics - and how the earth and its life forms came into being.

 He relies on his own extensive reading of the scientific literature and interviews with scientists who have advised and informed him in summarizing and organizing the scientific discoveries and technical discussions.

The non-fiction book is a history of discoveries and discoverers in the individual sciences considered here, based on many anecdotes. The book focuses on the different personalities and peculiarities of the scientists and the background of the scientific work, in which plagiarism and defamation, the formation of theories as well as insights and misjudgments also played a role.

This book, which quickly conquered the bestseller lists in Germany, became the best-selling non-fiction book in England in 2005 and, despite some factual errors and despite its one-sided Anglocentric orientation, won the European Commission's Descartes Prize in the same year for spreading scientific knowledge.

Bryson emphasizes the development of science, particularly the introduction of new methods and knowledge that often contradicted previous approaches and assumptions. For example, knowledge about the relative size and nature of elementary particles, the age of the earth and the discovery of complex geological processes that are gained through these methods.

 Furthermore, the development of physics from Newton to Einstein is discussed, whose postulates have contributed, among other things, to the theory of the Big Bang and the knowledge of an expanding universe. Findings from the field of mathematics, however, are largely ignored.

Using paleontological data and the realization that all living organisms possess the DNA molecule as their genetic material, Bryson underscores the fact that all life forms descended from a common ancestor. He also points out that humans are still a very young species,

 which he proves with results from genetic studies that have shown very little genetic variation in human populations. By combining data from paleontology, geology, and molecular biology, Bryson charts the origin of man. Human development was therefore likely favored by the extinction of the dinosaurs and likely influenced by geological and climatic changes that forced altered lifestyles and resettlement. Accordingly,

 only a series of coincidences made possible the long development, rich in developmental interruptions, of people whose previous existence was rather marginal compared to the periods of geological and biological development[4