57 pages • 1 hour read
Bill BrysonA Short History of Nearly Everything
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “How to Build a Universe”
Bryson opens the chapter by talking about protons, “the infinitesimal part of an atom.” Protons are the basic building blocks of life, yet they’re so small that “a little dib of ink like the dot on this ican hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years” (9). Despite their miniscule size, protons were fundamental to the creation of the universe. In a theory known as singularity, the creation of the universe occurred when every single particle of existence, every single atom, was squeezed into a space so small that it had no dimensions at all.It is hypothesized, although no one knows for certain, that this moment of singularity combined with a big bang created the universe. Yet, the mystery remains how, from nothing, the universe was birthed.
There is controversy in the scientific community regarding when the moment of creation occurred—some argue that it was 10 billion years ago, while others hypothesize twice that number. While the exact date of creation can never be known, The Big Bang is the most widely accepted theory for how creation came about. The theory was first made in the 1960s, when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two radio astronomers, discovered a persistent background noise coming from a large communications antenna. After relentless searching, the astronomers couldn’t find the source of the noise. They came to find outthe noise was the realization of what astrophysicist George Gamow had hypothesized in the 1940s as “cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang” (11).
There are many theories regarding what caused the Big Bang. However, Bryson stresses that the theory “isn’t about the bang itself but about what happened after the bang” (13). To understand what happened in the early moments of the universe comes inflation theory. First discovered by a junior particle physicist, Alan Guth, inflation theory postulates that “a fraction of a moment after the dawn of creation, the universe underwent a sudden dramatic expansion. It inflated—in effect ran away with itself, doubling in size every 10^34 seconds” (14). While the episode of expansion lasted a fraction of a second, it changed the universe from something palm-sized to something at least a trillion times bigger. Inflation theory helps to explain “the ripples and eddies that make our universe possible” (14).
Bryson ends the chapter by posing the question, “what would happen if you traveled out to the edge of the universe and, as it were, put your head through the curtains?” (16). It’s impossible, not because it’s too far away (although it hypothetically would be), but rather because after traveling in a straight line, you would end up where you started. This is because the universe bends. Similar to how our Earth is a sphere, there is no edge to the universe.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Welcome to the Solar System”
There have been such monumental advances in astronomy that “If someone struck a match on the moon, they [astronomers] could spot the flare” (19). Yet, despite these advances, astronomers hadn’t noticed that Pluto has a moon until 1978. But it’s not just any moon—it’s the biggest moon in the solar system. The size of Pluto’s moon means that Pluto is much smaller than originally thought, which made many scientists question the legitimacy of Pluto’s label as a planet. Despite these controversies, the real question is why did it take so long for astronomers to discover such a vast moon in our own solar system? According to astronomer Clark Chapman:
Most people think that astronomers get out at night in observatories and scan the skies. That’s not true. Almost all the telescopes we have in the world are designed to peer at very tiny little pieces of the sky way off in the distance to see a quasar or hunt for black holes or look for distant galaxies(20).
Nobody knows how big Pluto is, or what it’s made of, or much of anything about it. Some hypothesize that Pluto isn’t a planet but rather the largest known object in Kuiper Belt, a zone of galactic debris famous for Halley’s Comet. Pluto also doesn’t act like any other planet. While other planets follow a routine orbit, Pluto’s orbital path is slanted and unpredictable.
Many people imagine Pluto as the end of space, but in reality, space is so enormous that the size is beyond imagining—so much so that even our best efforts to draw our solar system to scale will always fail. This is because “On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to the about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway)” (24). If Pluto could ever be reached, the sun would be the size of a pin-head. Given the vast distance and emptiness of space, it’s no wonder that Pluto’s huge moon had gone unnoticed for so long.
Bryson makes the point that “when considering the universe at large we don’t actually know what is in our solar system” (25). According to Drake’s equation, a theory coined by Cornell professor Frank Drake in the 1960s, the probability that there is intelligent life somewhere out there is good.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Reverend Evan’s Universe”
The Reverend Robert Evans, a semiretired minister living in the Blue Mountains of Australia, hunts supernovae with his home telescope. Bryson explains that “Supernovae occur when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time brighter than all the stars in the galaxy” (30). If a supernova were to go off near Earth, everyone would die. However, the chances of that happening are slim because Supernovae are rare. Yet, despite being rare, Reverend Evans can spot them with his telescope. To understand just how amazing a feat this really is, Bryson tells readers to imagine fifteen hundred tables with black tablecloths covering them. Then throw salt across the tables. The salt grains are the stars in the galaxy. Now add a grain here and there, and Reverend Evans can spot that change.
The term supernova was first coined in the 1930s, by Fritz Zwicky, an astrophysicist working at the California Institute of Technology. While astronomers had long been puzzled by the appearance of rare and unexplained points of light in the night sky, Zwicky hypothesized that if a star collapsed, it would result in an “unimaginably compact core. Atoms would literally be crushed together, their electrons forced into the nucleus, forming neutrons” (32). This would basically result in the biggest bang in the universe.
Bryson gives the interesting fact that “Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot” (33). However, when Reverend Evans looks at the night sky with his sixteen-inch telescope, he is able to see tens of billions of stars in nearly 10,000 galaxies. Bryson says that the odds of Reverend Evans finding a supernova is like “standing on the observatory platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows in Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first-birthday cake” (33). And yet, Reverend Evans has found thirty-six supernovae to date.
Bryson concludes that supernovae are critical to the foundation of creation because they provided the necessary heat to produce the new elements needed for life to begin.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Bryson uses these first three chapters to explain what scientists know about the origins of life on Earth. Each chapter follows a similar pattern, in that Bryson starts with an anecdote, introduces the various scientists associated with each topic, and then uses analogies to explain each scientist’s findings and theories. Each chapter within this section systematically seeks to understand the origins of planet Earth and life itself. The first chapter focuses heavily on the theory of the Big Bang and what happened after the explosion, while the second and third chapters focus more on astronomy and supernova. However, by linking these ideas together, Bryson illustrates that the key to understanding anything about Earth’s origins is found in space.
Although Bryson isn’t a scientist himself, he frequently interjects his voice into the narrative and addresses the audience directly, which often makes him feel like an authority on the subject. For example, he says, “Now imagine if you can (and of course you can’t) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous” (9). Here, as is often found throughout the text, Bryson is urging the reader to imagine a scenario that he has conjured, in the hopes of helping the reader to better understand the larger idea. This simultaneously implicates the reader, while also demonstrating Bryson’s understanding of the topic, lending to his overall ethos.
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