A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bryson, a travel writer with no scientific training, set out to understand how scientists know what they claim to know, and wrote a survey of cosmology, geology, chemistry, physics, palaeontology and biology organised around the people who made the discoveries and the methods they used.

The structure moves from the largest scale to the smallest and then to life. He covers the Big Bang and the evidence for it, the measurement of the Earth's size and age, the discovery of the atom and of subatomic structure, plate tectonics and the decades of resistance to it, the mass extinctions, the discovery of DNA, and human evolution. He returns repeatedly to two themes: how recently most of this was established, and how much remains unknown.

Bryson concentrates on the human circumstances of discovery, including the disputes, the errors, the people who were ignored and the people who took credit. The account of Alfred Wegener's continental drift hypothesis being rejected for fifty years, and of Barry Marshall infecting himself to prove bacteria caused ulcers, are examples of his recurring interest in resistance to correct ideas. He is also consistent about uncertainty, reporting the size of error bars, the disagreements among specialists and the places where confident textbook statements rest on thin evidence.

The book was published in 2003 and parts are out of date, particularly in genetics, cosmology and palaeoanthropology. Scientists have identified errors, which later editions partly corrected. Bryson writes as an outsider, which produces both the accessibility and the occasional misstatement. It is a survey rather than a source, and its best use is as a demonstration of how scientific consensus forms and how often it is wrong first.