spaceponies

I orig­i­nally read the first half of this book and had to return it to the library before fin­ish­ing. I remem­bered that read­ing expe­ri­ence as: "What a great book! But then work got really busy before I could fin­ish." This is almost never the case; if you love a book through­out, it sim­ply doesn't get crowded out. I bought it and read through the whole work.

The first half is my favorite, filled sto­ries about the eccentrics of the sci­en­tists and their pas­sion for some tiny piece of the unknown. Human knowl­edge lurches for­ward in fits and starts, and the knowl­edge endures.

It wasn't sim­ply that [Mary] Anning was good at spot­ting fos­sils — though she was unri­valed at that — but that she could extract them with the great­est del­i­cacy and with­out dam­age. If you ever have the chance to visit the hall of ancient marine rep­tiles at the Nat­ural His­tory Museum in Lon­don, I urge you to take it for there is no other way to appre­ci­ate the scale and beauty of what this young woman achieved work­ing vir­tu­ally unaided with the most basic tools in nearly impos­si­ble con­di­tions. The ple­siosaur alone took her ten years of patient exca­va­tion. Although untrained, Anning was also able to pro­vide com­pe­tent draw­ings and descrip­tions for schol­ars. But even with the advan­tage of her skills, sig­nif­i­cant finds were rare and she passed most of her life in poverty.

In few words, Bryson com­pletely sum­ma­rizes and cap­tures a rel­e­vant detail. Not just one detail but the whole of geek­ery and the sci­en­tific pursuit.

The book paints a clear pic­ture of a sci­en­tific estab­lish­ment — an indus­try. It's dif­fi­cult to indus­tri­al­ize the pur­suit of knowl­edge. Through­out the nar­ra­tive, peo­ple who act as the gate­keep­ers are regarded as suc­cess­ful by their aca­d­e­mic degrees and pub­li­ca­tions — but not nec­es­sar­ily by advanc­ing knowl­edge. Prop­a­gat­ing that sys­tem is equally or more impor­tant than gen­er­at­ing new knowl­edge. Like most human sys­tems, it's lossy and flawed, as illus­trated an early attempt to cor­rectly cat­e­go­rize dinosaur bones, Gideon Mantell:

Aware that his find­ing would entirely upend what was under­stood about the past, and urged by his friend the Rev­erend William Buck­land [of Oxford] to pro­ceed with cau­tion, Man­tell devoted three painstak­ing years to seek­ing evi­dence to sup­port his conclusions.

…

Man­tell pre­pared a paper for deliv­ery to the Royal Soci­ety. Unfor­tu­nately, it emerged that another dinosaur had been found at a quarry in Oxford­shire and had just been for­mally described — by the Rev­erend Buck­land, the very man who had urged him not to work in haste.

I found these sto­ries mov­ing and inspir­ing — not because self­ish peo­ple exist every­where, even in sci­ence! — but that sci­ence and human knowl­edge moves on despite such peo­ple. A person's sin­gu­lar pas­sion, inside or out­side the indus­try, can advance human under­stand­ing. It just won't nec­es­sar­ily make you happy, famous, or rich.

Unfor­tu­nately, the closer Bryson gets to the present, the drier and more information-dense the book becomes. By the end, it's a very long lec­ture — a won­der­ful one, and I learned a lot. Atomic the­ory, genet­ics, and other top­ics are all ele­gantly and con­cisely sum­ma­rized. But I wouldn't have reread the book if it were just the sec­ond half.

He seemed to stop telling sto­ries about the peo­ple behind the sci­ence. The best I can guess is that either the tragic fig­ures in ques­tion are still alive (or their imme­di­ate descen­dents are), or his­tory hasn't given us enough time to develop an objec­tive view. Regard­ing the lat­ter: the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity loses a lot of time get­ting caught up in an idea and then cool­ing off and real­iz­ing that per­haps it's not a valid one. Bryson describes this in lov­ing detail many times in Short His­tory; for exam­ple, with ether:

As late as 1909, the great British physi­cist J. J. Thom­son was insist­ing: "The ether is not a fan­tas­tic cre­ation of the spec­u­la­tive philoso­pher; it is as essen­tial to us as the air we breathe" — this more than four years after it was pretty incon­testably estab­lished that it didn't exist. Peo­ple, in short, were really attached to the ether.

I'd say that the first half of this book is bril­liant, and the sec­ond half is com­pe­tent and suf­fers only in fol­low­ing the first. I love this book, I rec­om­mend it to everyone.

Ama­zon links:

• A Short His­tory of Nearly Every­thing : Kin­dle version.
• A Short His­tory of Nearly Every­thing : paperback
• A Short His­tory of Nearly Every­thing: Spe­cial Illus­trated Edi­tion : just printed (2010/10) and which I would have pur­chased, because the library/hardcover/back-breaking-to-carry ver­sion that I ini­tially read was so won­der­ful that I was some­what sad to buy the text-only form. The side­bars with vin­tage radium lip­gloss adver­tise­ments alone were worth it.