Sunday, January 10, 2021

A Short History of Nearly Everything

 


Book: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Basic Information : Synopsis : Expectations : Thoughts : Evaluation : Book Group : New Words : Book References : Good Quotes : Table of Contents : References

Basic Information:

Author: Bill Bryson

Edition: ePub on Libby from the Mountain View Public Library

Publisher: Broadway Books

ISBN: 076790818X (ISBN13: 9780767908184)

Start Date: December 19, 2020

Read Date: January 10,2021

544 pages

Genre: History, Science,

Language Warning: None

Rated Overall: 3 out of 5


Synopsis:

Bryson walks us through the history of discovery in two parts. The first is how the universe is thought to have been created, from the Big Bang to how the continents have come together.


He then takes us through the beginnings of life to the current day.


He also walks us through the various fits and starts of how science has developed this picture of our universe.

 

Expectations:
  • Recommendation: Osher
  • When: December 7, 2020
  • Date Became Aware of Book: A while back
  • How come do I want to read this book: Osher book club book


Thoughts:



INTRODUCTION

Bryson starts off by noting how random chance brought us to where we are today. Bryson had a grade school science book where he became curious about” how did scientists know” what was being said in the book. To Bryson, the greatest of all amazements—how scientists work things out. Bryson decided to dedicate part of his life to reading books and journals and finding saintly, patient experts prepared to answer a lot of outstandingly dumb questions.



PART I LOST IN THE COSMOS

1 How to Build a Universe

He gets into how large and small, short and long everything physically is and how it starts.


This is where he starts to be cute. He tries to describe in a sentence or two the status of the universe-inflationary or static? But he is a bit loose in his terms such as the edge of creation. He seems to be taking a very artistic use of terms, rather than terms to describe. Sort of confusing From this term, I was wondering how far into the Creation vs Evolution argument he was going to get.


Once again, he almost gets religious on me: from nothing, our universe begins You almost think he has read Genesis. But upon reflection, maybe that is how his book will be presented.


He talks about the beginnings of the universe taking three minutes. I wonder what time really means in that context? Definitely not in relationship with our day. With things exploding (expanding) at the speed of light, time is different. But we humans need to have some sort of time context.


He talks about how AT&T scientists realized that the hiss they were hearing on space radio was the leftover sound of the beginnings of the universe.


… disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang.

He quotes a Stanford scientist, Dr Andrei Linde: These are very close to religious questions when asked about how things went from nothing to everything. See my comment above. Maybe all things dealing with beginnings have to have a religious context.


1043 seconds At least in the ebook version, it seems like the minus sign always gets dropped. I think what he really meant was 10-43 The seconds he quotes is just under 685 million years. Later on he writes it out as a decimal place. Things like this makes me suspicious of other things Bryson writes, or at least how it is presented in this book. By the way, it is the same thing a couple more paragraphs later.


Byrson talks about that gravity formed quickly, but not initially after the beginning explosion. He notes that if the gravitational pull had been stronger or weaker, what we know would not have been. Is this because of changes in mass and density? Or that the actual forces which the gravitational equations use changed?


And then Bryson sets science back 500 years by saying We are all at the center of it all. And then he hedges his statement by saying scientists assume we are not the center.


2 Welcome to the Solar System

Our telescopes usually are pointed to only a small portion of the sky at any one time. Consequently if we see something, it may be that we are looking at something just at the right time. Also the skies are not as crisp as the artist renderings make it.


Bryson talks a lot about Pluto as a planet. But most astronomers have now degraded it. So I do not know what that does to the moon Bryson starts the chapter with.


He goes on and talks about the Kuipler belt where many of the comments come from.


He also talks about the relative distances the planets are from each other. He takes us on a hypothetical trip to the limits of the solar system. And we are still finding more. The point to remember, of course, is that when considering the universe at large we don’t actually know what is in our own solar system


3 The Reverend Evans's Universe

Reverend Robert Evans-amateur astronomer from Australia, finder of supernovae


Talks about neutron stars and how they are formed. Also talked about dark mass.


Evans makes a statement the absence of evidence is evidence. Which on the surface seems a bit like if I keep my eyes closed, that is evidence of some kind. But what he is talking about is if you find x number of phenomena in a y amount of time. That can tell you how much is out there. Also if you do not find that phenomena in a location, then you may start wondering about the distribution-both time and location-wise.


New technology is downgrading the need for night-time observers like Evans. Now even amateurs are finding supernovae with charge-coupled devices. “With CCDs you can aim a telescope at the sky and go watch television,” Evans said with a touch of dismay. “It took all the romance out of it.” There is a bit of sadness to it. Somehow sending a drone into space which detects a great deal of phenomena will never have the impact which a Neil Armstrong planting a flag on the moon.


Talking about if Alpha Centauri went supernova-being 4,3 light years away. What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones. The answer is we would never know about it. The moment light hit us, so would destruction. It would blow away our protection atmosphere, leaving us defenseless to the sun’s rays, let along from the supernova’s. None of our neighbors are candidates for this phenomena.


He then goes on and talks a bit about formation from supernova.



PART II THE SIZE OF THE EARTH

4 The Measure of Things

Talks about a 1735 expedition to Peru to figure out distances in the Andes and possibly the world. This expedition was one which fell apart from the beginnings. Bryson puts in, I hope tongue in cheek, that the fact that eighteenth-century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.


Why do the planets go into elliptical orbits? Hooke, Halley, Wren and eventually Newton would be involved. From this, Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy was written. Speaking of this, Bryson says Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can’t quite decide which is the more amazing—the fact or the thinking of it. In it is stated the three laws of motion. The Royal Society backed out of publishing it as they had a recent flop. Halley published by himself.


Richard Norwood worked out a pretty close number for the distance of a degree.


Talks about the measurements of Mason and Dixon.


Interesting information, since I love topo maps. Charles Hutton had invented contour lines


Henry Cavendish-resided at Clapham. Being a recluse, I do not suppose he had any connection with the Clapham people who eventually abolished slavery in Great Britan. He got much of Thermodynamics right before the laws were formulated. He discovered hydrogen. He also figured out the weight of the earth to within 1%.


5 The Stone-Breaker

Talks about the beginning of geology. How did things like seashells end up high up in the mountains. Geology in its infancy in the early 1800’s generated a lot of non-scientist interest. Sort of an early crowd-sourcing. Title “stone-breaker” comes from how those who were trying to do geological work called themselves. Talks about Charles Lyell. Byrson talks a little bit about how wrong Bishop Ussher’s dating was. Which leads into dating of the earth.


6 Science Red in Tooth and Claw

In 1787 the first dinosaur bone was found in America near Woodbury, New Jersey. More bones are found in various places and they are put together in a rather haphazard way. Once it was figured out that fossils could help date the layers of rock, then they started to figure out where the relative layers of earth were.


Bryson goes into another attack on how and why things in the Bible could not be correct.


Also he talks about rivalries and jealousies between paleontologists such as Huxley, Owens, and Matrell. These were English. But Americans had their own wars. Seldom—perhaps never—has science been driven forward more swiftly and successfully by animosity


7 Elemental Matters

Time to talk chemistry.


I am hoping that in trying to be cute, Bryson is just confusing. He talks about the difference between organic and inorganic chemistry. In there he talks about a mystery substance, an elan vital. His confusing statement concerning elan vital is: ... it existed in some substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry: organic (for those substances that were thought to have it) and inorganic (for those that did not). As far as I can tell, during the next page, he says nothing about carbon, which is the difference. And according to the ACS (I think the American Chemical [or Chemistry] Society), it is not just life giving properties, but also things like paint, petrochemicals, and explosives.


He talks about the atom. He gives a brief, very brief comment on Avagado’s Principle without mentioning the number 6.023x1023. This is the number of atoms in a standard unit weight of a chemical. Bryson talks about the width of an atom, which he says is very small-yes it is.


Bryson talks about how the names of elements were standardized. And then about the Periodic Table. Byrson says that what is certain is that anything that is found will fit neatly into Mendeleyev’s great scheme.


He talks about discovering radiation-Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie with assistance from Pierre Curie.



PART III A NEW AGE DAWNS

8 Einstein's Universe

Michelson and Morley removed the need for space being ether. Also shows that light is always measured at the same speed. Talks about Max Plank figuring out quantum mechanics. This leads to Einstein and relativity. Einstein produced a paper called “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. It had no footnotes or citations, contained almost no mathematics, made no mention of any work that had influenced or preceded it, and acknowledged the help of just one individual, a colleague at the patent office named Michele Besso. The formula E=mc2 Would follow in a subsequent paper a few months later.


And then Einstein’s most important ideas came to fruit.”Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity.” This implied a universe which was not static. To correct this problem, Einstein put in a factor-which was not needed. It was discovered that stars are moving away from the center of the universe.


Hubble was set on determining how old the universe is. He computed how quickly stars were moving away and then took some good estimates on how far away a star was. He used several other people’s work to come up with these figures.


9 The Mighty Atom

Distilling a lot of science: Richard Feynman: All things are made of atoms. Bryson goes on and talks about how we are all made out of reused atoms. I am surprised that Bryson did not use this quote from Alan Sandage;s The Creation of the Universe:


Every single atom in your body was once inside a star


John Dalton figured out the basics of atoms, not how they are made up, but they being small particulars each unique in their own weight. Then talks about Rutherford and his contributions to figuring out radioactivity. Bryson then goes into explaining about the makeup of an atom. He does a good job of explaining that a neutron does not affect the identity of an atom, only its weight. He also talks about how most of an atom is empty space. But what is there is very dense.


And here he starts to get into explaining quantums and how electrons are not really little balls which spin around in an orbit but as Bryson says more as fan blades as being everywhere at once.


And then there is one of my more favorite theory’s, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. And then the cat I cannot get my head around-Schrodinger’s cat.


All of this leads to the fact that we will never be able to observe certain things because the moment we observe we have displaced.


The upshot of all of this is you had two laws, and I would say a third one, to govern how the universe operated:

  • Quantum mechanics for very small items
  • Relativity for very large
  • My third is thermodynamics for the middle.


10 Getting the Lead Out

Talked about how lead was in almost any product in the early 1900’s. There was knowledge of it having negative health effects. But it was also easy to use and cheap to add to products to make them perform better. Then CFC’s are talked about.


And then the Carbom-14 test to date when things were done. But To begin with, it was discovered that one of the basic components of Libby’s formula [Libby was the person who figured out about Carbon-14 dating] , known as the decay constant, was off by about 3 percent. By this time, however, thousands of measurements had been taken throughout the world. Rather than restate every one, scientists decided to keep the inaccurate constant. So all dates we read today are about 3% older than recorded. This sort of means that you have a compromise for truth vs expediency’s sake.


And then there are other reasons why Carbon-14 dating can be off. We now know that the volume of atmospheric carbon-14 varies depending on how well or not Earth’s magnetism is deflecting cosmic rays, and that that can vary significantly over time. This means that some carbon-14 dates are more dubious than others. This is particularly so with dates just around the time that people first came to the Americas, which is one of the reasons the matter is so perennially in dispute. Is carbon-14 dating still used? According to Wikipedia, it sounds like it still is. Sounds like the best way to think about Carbon-14 dating is as an approximation.


By using Potassium-40, Arthur Holmes was able to date the earth at 4.55 billion years.


Bryson gets back to testing to see if lead was harmful.


11 Muster Mark's Quarks

Starts off by talking about particle accelerators. These found all sorts of subatomic particles.


And he goes again and talks about 1024 (instead of 10-24 ) seconds. He does write it out as decimals, so it is clear what he is trying to go after.


Going after subatomic particles is expensive. Not sure what we get out of it, except for understanding.


Interesting that he quotes Leon Lederman to say: We don’t really see the creator twiddling twenty parameters to create the universe as we know it. I know that Lederman is not talking about the Christian God as creator, still it is interesting to see that it gets very hard to get away from the creator image.


He talks about the Standard Model, and acknowledges that it is at least incomplete, if without a type of mathematical beauty. He then goes on and talks a bit like string theory. This seems less clarifying for us laymen and sounding more like making up stuff. This seems to be the consensus of physicists. One says it is hard for the layman to differentiate between the weird and crackpot theories.


And on the large scale, scientists still squabble over the age of the universe. Still the squabbling is in terms of 10 or 20 billion, not 4,000 years. And then the fact is, there is a great deal, even at quite a fundamental level, that we don’t know—not least what the universe is made of. To add to the confusion, we also talk about dark matter-stuff we think is there, but cannot sense.


12 The Earth Moves

Talking about Continental Drift-better to be called plate tectonics. There were a lot of explanations to get around finding similar rocks and fossil formations on either side of the Atlantic.


Another problem bearing on this was if the rivers had been carrying silt for all the millions of years, where was it all going? There should be enough silt to cover any formations underwater. But that was not true.


And then there was the problem that a long underwater mountain range going down the Atlantic Ocean, arcing through the Indian and then back up the Pacific Ocean was found. This was determined to be pretty old. But alongside it, there was a long canyon in the Atlantic with young material. Harry Hess realized that this was new ocean crust being formed.


Magnetic changes in the earth also were fitting a pattern of continents being together.


The reason why it is better called plate tectonics is that it is not just continents which are part of this change. Portions of land mass within continents change as well. Example they gave was part of Antarctica may have been part of the Appalachians in America. A fragment of Staten island in New York came from Africa.


This leads to earthquakes.


But do continents move as a whole or is it more like a sand going over a conveyor belt?



PART IV DANGEROUS PLANET

13 Bang!

Manson, IW - large asteroid hit at least 2.5 million years ago. Gigantic blast. But now it is worn down so not much is left.


Talks about Shoemaker and Levy’s work of looking for space debris which may impact the earth.


Near misses happen several times a week without us knowing about them.


And then there is the iridium layer of dust throughout the world which the Alveraz’s found. This indicated a world wide catsophere. This brings us back to Manson. It was shown that this was not the cause of the iridium. But another crater was found around the Yucatan. Then coming back to Shoemaker and Levy, a comet hit Jupiter, showing what kind of effect an impact of a comet or an asteroid would have.


If an asteroid was headed towards earth today, how much warning would we have? Probably none, or nothing which would help us any. Bryson goes into a possible scenario of being hit by an asteroid-pretty devastating.


Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.


14 The Fire Below

Talks about finding the fossil bed at Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park. You usually find fossils in dry, hot places with exposed rock, not in the middle of a prairie. The ash which killed all of the animals found here was from a volcanic explosion in Yellowstone.


This leads us to the unstable core of the earth and the mantle we live on. It was deduced when a shockwave from a Guatemalan earthquake sent off waves which seemed to bounce off at an unexpected angle.


Now we come to measure earthquakes and what has been known as the Reitcher (Richter scale) scale. Bryson notes that this is an arbitrary measure of the Earth’s tremblings based on surface measurements. It rises exponentially, so that a 7.3 quake is fifty times more powerful than a 6.3 earthquake and 2,500 times more powerful than a 5.3 earthquake. Is Bryson right that this each order is 50 times more powerful, not 100? According to WIkipedia: This was later revised and renamed the local magnitude scale, denoted as ML or ML . Because of various shortcomings of the ML  scale, most seismological authorities now use other scales, such as the moment magnitude scale (Mw ), This was later revised and renamed the local magnitude scale, denoted as ML or ML . Because of various shortcomings of the ML  scale, most seismological authorities now use other scales, such as the moment magnitude scale (Mw ),


Tokyo-the city waiting to die (Bill McGuire) due to the pent up demand for an earthquake.


The earth is made up of four layers: rocky outer crust, a mantle of hot viscous rock, a liquid outer core, and solid inner core. There is varying depth of the crust-some places which was unexpected. Recently there was the discovery of convection beneath the earth surface.


15 Dangerous Beauty

Bob Christinsen was wondering, if Yellowstone was created by volcanic activity, where was the volcano? When he saw a satellite photo, he realized the whole park was the caldera.


Talks about different types of volcanoes.


Goes into Yellowstone some more.


When a supervolcano blows, there will be a long volcanic winter world wide, maybe around six years.


When you go to a park like Yellowstone (or Yosemite, or …) you accept the risk that something could happen.



PART V LIFE ITSELF

16 Lonely Planet

We live in a world where much of life exists outside of the boundaries of extremes. We do not live in the high elevations or the depths of the sea. In the extreme cold of the pols and the heat of the deserts. We create artificial environments to stand these extremes. Bryson lists conditions which made this planet just right for us:

  • Excellent location
  • The right kind of planet
  • Twin Planet (the moon)
  • Timing

17 Into the Troposphere

Bryson starts talking about the atmosphere. He names the various layers of atmosphere: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and ionosphere (or thermosphere). He points out that even at 120 miles thick, it is a pretty thin layer of protection.


Bryson makes a comment to show how protective our atmosphere is. He says that Even raindrops would pound us senseless if it weren’t for the atmosphere’s slowing drag. I think he gets carried away here trying to show an example of how protective it is. But really, if we had no atmosphere, we would not have any raindrops to cut through us.


Interesting: When you see the top of a storm cloud flattening out into the classic anvil shape, you are looking at the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere.

Bryson goes on and talks about weather. He also talks about the carbon cycle.


18 The Bounding Main

Onward to the discussion of water. He talks about some of the properties of water and how ubiquitous it is. It is vital to us to live. The oceans are not level, so there is not really a set sea level-there is a standard though. Wonder what that standard is?


Talks about early exploration of the depths of the ocean.


Oceans were viewed as dumping places. Especially radioactive waste. But also we have considered the oceans as inexhaustible. They are not.


19 The Rise of Life

How did life begin? A graduate student in the 1950’s was able to simulate the elements which would be building blocks for life. But Repeating Miller’s experiments with these more challenging inputs has so far produced only one fairly primitive amino acid. At all events, creating amino acids is not really the problem. The problem is proteins.


To make a protein is highly complex involving hundreds if not thousands of amino acids in the right way. Here Bryson dances on the edge of saying that life is almost impossible to begin, something like only 1 out of 10260 possibilities if hitting the right combination. Paul Davies noted If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place.


One sort of wonders if some sort of intelligence put them together.


Bryson’s other explanation is from Richard Dawkins saying that there was a trial forming of small groups to see what worked. Then more and more complex.


And then he says that life itself ... demonstrate[s] repeatedly that complexity is a natural, spontaneous, entirely commonplace event. There may or may not be a great deal of life in the universe at large, ... Complexity is not what happens naturally. At least in chemistry, things try for the simplest arrangement. You do not get H4O2 when H2O will work. Even the sugar molecules as complex as they are are not like the ones Bryson is talking about.


When Bryson talks about how powerful the impulse it is to assemble in nature, what does he mean? Where is this impulse? He quotes a Nobel laureate (de Duve) saying there is an obligatory manifestation to do this. What makes it obligatory?


One possibility of where all of this came from is outer space on a meteorite.


How do scientists know about early life? From carbon remains, not fossils or any such items.


Bryson describes the atmosphere of ancient earth as being non-conducive to current life. That oxygen is fundamentally toxic often comes as a surprise to those of us who find it so convivial to our well-being, but that is only because we have evolved to exploit it. Describes the beginning form of life. How did we get oxygen? Tiny little creatures gradually created oxygen until the earth’s atmosphere had about 20% oxygen. Then more complex organisms could start to develop. As time passed, two types of organisms developed: those we gave off oxygen (plants for example) and those which consumed it (animals).


Of course someplace along the lines, we have to ask, what is life?


20 Small World

Onward to microbes.


Bryson opens with this: If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains—about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. Lovely! Bryson points out we cannot escape microbes. That This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.


It is hard to replicate what they do. They are everywhere and can live in such extremes, we would perish-airlessness, heat, cold, … We tend to categorize life as either animal or botanical. Bryson points out that microbes and the like is ever so much more extensive than both of those combined. Even among bacteria there are distinguishing differences which says that they are not bacteria, but something which mimics it.


Quotes Jared Diamond (read most of his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, but I think he is quoting from Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies)


Bryson talks about our bodies defenses-white blood cells.


Bacteria and viruses also have an unnerving capacity to burst upon the world in some new and startling form and then to vanish again as quickly as they came. Ironic that our OSHER class read this book during the COVID-19 pandemic which came on in just a few months and will last for who knows how long. Sort of line the pandemic of 1918. In the United States, the first deaths were recorded among sailors in Boston in late August 1918, but the epidemic quickly spread to all parts of the country.


21 Life Goes On

We now read about fossils. He talks about how one bone in a billion gets fossilized, let alone found. This raises the question about distribution. Why are there some places where many fossils are found? Also 95% of the fossils we have today were marine animals.


As a note, Bryson seems to think that all religious thinking is against science. More from a couple of comments he makes.


Also interesting is the argument among those who are evolutionists about various interpretations. Almost sounds like a religious war from Bryson’s descriptions.


22 Good-bye to All That

Another item which few of us consider: lichen. In Antartica, here are four hundred types of them. The world has more than twenty thousand species of lichens. Lichens are slow growing. A lichen about the size of a quarter may be 50 years old.


Bryson gets a little philosophical about lichen. They do not seem to have a lot of ambition to take over. This is perhaps a little odd because life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions. Or are humans the odd ones? Also what gives it this ambition? Is it just a chemical reaction?


He has an interesting clock showing how little time land creatures have been around. He notes that the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Sort of depressing that if you follow a mechanical universe all which you are left with is just a record of your existence, maybe, if it can be found. The alternative to extinction is stagnation,” says Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History, “and stagnation is seldom a good thing in any realm.”


For the most part, we do not know why extinctions happen-massive solar flare, asteroids, … We also do not know why certain species survived while others were obliterated. Stephen Jay Gould expressed it succinctly in a well-known line: “Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history


He takes a flying leap bring us from the oceans to land masses with plant life.


Four points Bryson makes about life:

  • Life wants to be
  • Life does not always want much
  • Life goes extinct from time to time
  • Life goes on

Sounds a bit like religious thought than scientific. What drives this Life which Bryson talks about? What gives it this drive?


23 The Richness of Being

Talks about the London Museum of Natural History-how it has samples of almost everything discovered.


And then he goes on to mosses.


Talking about Carl vonLinne who thought he was the greatest. Bryson gives an interesting line: It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had weeds named after them. vonLinne is the one who gave us plant classifications. Even now, there are oftentimes the same species has been named twice. We do not know how many species there are currently on earth-on estimate is 1.5 to 1.8 million. We have no universal systematized knowledge base of this. I wonder if there is one now, 20 years later?


Most living things on earth are small and can be easily overlooked. if your pillow is six years old—which is apparently about the average age for a pillow—it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of “sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung,” to quote the man who did the measuring. If a pillow has this, what about the rest of the earth.


We are still finding large quantities of new species.


We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way


24 Cells

Talking about cells. From Bryson’s comments, he edges on the thought that each cell is interchangeable in your body and each cell can perform the function of any other cell. I think what he is trying to cell is that each cell has a function which allows it to work with other cells to form your body.


He talks about nitrous oxide as being something your body cannot live without-there is not a disclaimer that it is used in a special way in the body and is not compatible to be administered other ways.


Most cells are good for a day or two before they die and are discarded. Brain cells last a lifetime. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters. Meaning that most of our cells are very new.


He goes through how cells were observed.


He describes cancer as a cell division gone wrong.


Is this true? Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again


25 Darwin's Singular Notion

Talked about Charles Darwin. Turns out that his father-in-law was Josiah Wedgwood . Wedgewood was not only a pottery maker as Bryson notes, but was an abolitionist and followed WIlbur Wilberforce. Also Wedgewood was a devout Christian. Just interesting the connections. Darwin tried law instead, but found that insupportably dull. He had also tried medicine, but could not stand the blood or the surgery. Darwin got invited along on the Beagle to be the Captain’s dining and conversation partner. FitzRoy’s formal assignment was to chart coastal waters, but his hobby—passion really—was to seek out evidence for a literal, biblical interpretation of creation.


Bryson goes through how Darwin’s ideas had a cool reception among the scientific folks of his time. Sort of interesting that as much flack as the religious got, the scientists also had a hard time accepting his theories.


William Paley in 1802 and known as argument from design.


Bryson notes that even though the title of his book is On the Origin of Species, Darwin does not explain how species originates, rather how they evolve. Even then it took Mendel to explain how traits continued in a species instead of being diluted. Neither of them initiallyproposed that we are descended from apes. Darwin eventually did, but much later.


26 The Stuff of Life

Bryson talks about inbreeding, but uses the term incest. He says that You couldn’t be here without a little incest—actually quite a lot of incest—albeit at a genetically discreet remove. He shows that someplace along the lines we are all related in some fashion, from a statistical view. But is that really incest? According to Wikipedia, it definitely is in the case of first degree. But beyond a third-degree, it is not seen as incest. So what does Bryson mean?


Much has been made in recent years of the unraveling of the human genome. Bryson says that all humans have a different genome. Isn’t what being said by the human genome is more the components and what makes each part of us function? Not that we are all the same.


Bryson goes on and talks about what is a genome. But is it like a sentence with letters so the combinations have length? He talks like it does”: every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, He says there are only four components, but the length of the message makes it unique. He then talks about RNA or ribonucleic acid, which acts as an interpreter between the two (DNA and proteins).


Both peas and fruit flies have been used to determine how mutations work.


Once again rival scientists dish each other’s work.


As the understanding of the structure of DNA grew, it looked like there was a lot of the sequence of DNA which was not used. Sometimes when the DNA is broken apart and reconnected, they do not connect right. This can cause a susceptibility to a disease or illness, or it can mean a benefit. Also as scientists experimented with DNA, they concluded that it seemed like much of a species is to generate DNA, not just their own, but anything they could match with. Life, it appeared, was drawn up from a single set of blueprints. Why do the same genres turn into different part of the body? It is the hox genes that instruct them, and they do it for all organisms in much the same way.



PART Vl THE ROAD TO US

27 Ice Time

1816-year without a summer because of a volcanic eruption in Indonesian, Sumbawa.


There was the beginning of understanding how powerful glaciers are. Agassiz was the first evangelist of this idea. Gwen Schultz has noted that It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts. Bryson traces the cycle of ice ages including the world freezing over.


In the cycles of ice age and calm, they come in about 8,000 year cycles. We have passed its ten thousandth anniversary. The fact is, we are still very much in an ice age.


At the end of this thousand-year onslaught average temperatures leapt again, by as much as seven degrees in twenty years, which doesn’t sound terribly dramatic but is equivalent to exchanging the climate of Scandinavia for that of the Mediterranean in just two decades.

A self-induced global warming may not have the consequences we would hope for. It may just provide for greater instability. Elizabeth Kolbert says the last thing you’d want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it. It being the Earth its climate.


28 The Mysterious Biped

In search of the earliest humanoids. Various early man parts were found and discounted. Bryson traces various finds and the early struggles to put them in the right chronological and geographical orders. Also are they human or ape or some crossover? And then there is the uneven distribution across time and location.


Talks about Lucy.


And then about the discovery of footprints by Leaky. The New York Museum has a diorama. The tableau is done with such conviction that it is easy to overlook the consideration that virtually everything above the footprints is imaginary.


Being upright has a number of disadvantages-not as fast, cannot climb as well, childbirth is problematic. But Faced with attack, modern humans have only two advantages. We have a good brain, with which we can devise strategies, and we have hands with which we can fling or brandish hurtful objects. We are the only creature that can harm at a distance. We can thus afford to be physically vulnerable.


29 The Restless Ape

Tools and tool making is included in this chapter. Talks about Neandertals and homo sapiens being around the same time frame in the same locations, but unknown about relationships.


There are a couple different theories about human development. One has it that there are at least a couple of different stocks humans have developed from-this could lead into racist naratives. This is from a thought that human evolution has been continuous. Another is that we are missing steps in our examination of human development.


A note about, it does raise the question in my mind about what to do with science and data which leads to a hypothesis which is out of step with societal norms? If it was shown that different races ascended from different homo species, what do we do with the implications? Do we call the people who are reporting on a shown hypothesis as being racists and let it go at that? Or do we follow things to a conclusion, even if it is uncomfortable?


Acheulean tools: the type site of Saint-Acheul, is an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture characterized by distinctive oval and pear-shaped "hand-axes" associated with Homo erectus and derived species such as Homo heidelbergensis.


Mitochondrial DNA : the DNA located in mitochondria, cellular organelles within eukaryotic cells that convert chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use, adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Mitochondrial DNA is only a small portion of the DNA in a eukaryotic cell; most of the DNA can be found in the cell nucleus and, in plants and algae, also in plastids such as chloroplasts.


Mitochondrial DNA showed that we are not descended from Neandertals, and probably have things in common enough that we are descended from common ancestry, not from different homo species. But there are also anomalies in this as well.


The bottom line is that there are, or at least was 20 years ago, things which we do not understand under one set of theories or another set of theories. None of it is consistent. Depending on how you trace back the various DNA, you go back to various different places.


30 Good-bye

In talking about extinction, Bryson says that there is no better way to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of human beings than the bringing forth of Newton’s Principia or the man-caused extinction of the dodo bird.I wonder about the use of the words divine and felonious. Are these used in a specific way? Or are they more words which are used for effect? They both appeal to something beyond ourselves.


The question that arises is whether the disappearances of the Stone Age and disappearances of more recent times are in effect part of a single extinction event—whether, in short, humans are inherently bad news for other living things. Or are there other explanations?


Bryson’s conclusion is that if you were designing a universe, you would not put humans in charge of managing it. Very much a dig at the Genesis story. I have a slightly different take. We were given the mission of naming the animals and to manage the world. From what Bryson is describing, we have gone overboard on the naming and cataloging and collecting of specimens, but failed at the managing part. What Bryson did not bring up was the other part of the equation which Genesis talks about-our fallenness corrupted the plan. Bryson’s conclusion is It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. If you follow what Bryson says throughout the book, the supreme achievement would not follow. If as he alludes to there is life out there and it may be abundant, it would follow that there are probably beings more advanced than us.


From Byrson, the conclusion is that it is luck for us to be here and luck for us to continue. I think I would rather believe in a God who created us and wants us to continue.



Evaluation:

 Bill Bryson is a master wordsmith. You can read and hear his words and become enchanted. That includes this book as well. But is this the type of book which you want a storyteller to tell?


He takes us through the beginnings of the universe, the Big Bang and works his way first through the creation of matter, then how solar systems were put together. Then our own solar system. Finally how our own planet was formed and continues to change. Then he talks about what life looked like at the start and then built. Not only built, but had several fits and starts and rebuilds. Till finally we are where we are at now. About ⅓ of the book is about the creation of the biology of this planet.


Does Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything deliver on what the title suggests?First, coming in at 500+ pages, it is not “short”, even though you can argue it could be every so much longer. Next, I think he delivers on about half of “everything”. He goes through the creation of the Universe and the physics and chemistry well. He also talks about the evolution of life on earth. Is that everything? What about humans themselves? Such as psychology or sociology? History, religion and philosophy? And all the other “ologies”?


One thing which Bryson does is give an overview of how the science behind his subjects evolved. You learn that discovery and understanding are non-linear, and there are a lot of regressions as well as development. There are feuds, and temper tantrums among the scientists. One question which I was left with was, with all of the fits and starts the development of scientific thought has, how can we say our current set of descriptions are adequate or correct?


I would have liked the book a bit better if Bryson had ended the book on what we do not know and hope to discover-even if it was twenty years ago, rather than we are lucky to exist at all and will be lucky to continue to exist. It seems like Bryson makes several quasi-religious appeals (people are both divine and felonious) then ends with the “lucky secular ending”. This all seems inconsistent.


The answer to my first question is No. I appreciate the way Bryson puts together words in this book. But there are times he gets too cutesy, about overtaken by his words, masking what he is trying to get across.I think the question is, would I rather read Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, or this book by Bryson? Even though Bryson is an easier read than Hawkings, Hawkings I think I would trust to get the story right.



Notes from my book group:

Do you think Bryson was accurate in his reporting of the science in the recounting of the development of our current status of science?


When you encounter errors in a book, even if it is typographical, how does that change your perception of the book?


It has been twenty years since Bryson wrote this book. What has changed in the areas Bryson has talked about?


What place do amateurs scientists have in Bryson’s book? In today’s world, can amateurs do any significant science? What does it take to be a contributor? Is this of interest to you?


Does it surprise you that there were so many personal affronts happening in the world of science as Bryson reported? Do you know of any personal disagreements in today’s world of science? How do disagreements affect how the results of scientific work is viewed?


Bryson talks about how at times, earth has had very destructive events-sometimes it has happened in an instance such as a large meteorite or a prolonged period of cold or a volcanic explosion. What does this say about life on this planet? What does this say about what humans should expect? What does this say about how to live your own life?.


Bryson talks about how it was determined that Carbon-14 testing resulted in dates about 3% newer than actuality. It was decided not to adjust the dates on things previously dated. Why did they not adjust the dates? When you read this, what was your reaction to this “fidgeting” with dates?


Throughout the book, Bryson uses terms like “created by”, “powerful impulse”, “obligatory manifestation“, “allowed”, “drive”, “divine” … Are these just shortcomings in Bryson’s presentation or a recognition of the unexplained or something else?Why is it so hard to talk about science without talking about causes behind the science?


What is life?


It is an underlying theme of Bryson’s book that our understanding of our world is a developing one. The understanding has changed significantly, sometimes contradicting previous knowledge. When you view a scientific tenant of today, how do you evaluate how solid statements are made? How do you distinguish between what is solid and will not change versus that understanding which is evolving?


Where do you get your scientific information from? How do you judge its veracity?


What science did Bryson leave out of his book? Why did he not include things which are dealing with humans, such as psychology or sociology?


Many of these questions are either from or adapted from LitLovers.

Why the title of A Short History of Nearly Everything?

Does this book work as a history of science? Which would you rather have told this history, a scientist or a storyteller?

Did the ending seem fitting? Satisfying? Predictable?

Every story has a world view. Were you able to identify this story’s world view? What was it? How did it affect the story?

In what context was religion talked about in this book?

Was there anybody you would consider religious?

How did they show it?

Was the book overtly religious?

How did it affect the book's story?

Why do you think the author wrote this book?

What would you ask the author if you had a chance?

What “takeaways” did you have from this book?

What central ideas does the author present?

Are they personal, sociological, global, political, economic, spiritual, medical, or scientific

What evidence does the author use to support the book's ideas?

Is the evidence convincing...definitive or...speculative?

Does the author depend on personal opinion, observation, and assessment? Or is the evidence factual—based on science, statistics, historical documents, or quotations from (credible) experts?

What implications for you, our nation or the world do these ideas have?

Are these idea’s controversial?

To whom and why?

Are there solutions which the author presents?

Do they seem workable? Practicable?

How would you implement them?

Describe the culture talked about in the book.

How is the culture described in this book different than where we live?

What economic or political situations are described?

Does the author examine economics and politics, family traditions, the arts, religious beliefs, language or food?

How did this book affect your view of the world?

Of how God is viewed?

What questions did you ask yourself after reading this book?

Talk about specific passages that struck you as significant—or interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, sad...?

What was memorable?



New Words:

  • albedo (2: Welcome to the Solar System): the proportion of the incident light or radiation that is reflected by a surface, typically that of a planet or moon.
  • convivial (4: The Measure of Things):friendly, lively, and enjoyable.
  • greywacke (5: The Stone-Breakers): a variety of sandstone generally characterized by its hardness, dark color, and poorly sorted angular grains of quartz, feldspar, and small rock fragments or lithic fragments set in a compact, clay-fine matrix.
  • scintillations (9: The Mighty Atom):a flash or sparkle of light.
  • branes (11: Muster Mark’s Quarks):Branes are dynamical objects which can propagate through spacetime according to the rules of quantum mechanics. They have mass and can have other attributes such as charge.
  • panspermia (19: The Rise of Life): the theory that life on the earth originated from microorganisms or chemical precursors of life present in outer space and able to initiate life on reaching a suitable environment.
  • jocose (19: The Rise of Life):playful or humorous.
  • saltationist (25: Darwin’s Singular Notion):any of several theories holding that the evolution of species proceeds in major steps by the abrupt transformation of an ancestral species into a descendant species of a different type, rather than by the gradual accumulation of small changes.
  • genome (26: The Stuff of Life):the complete set of genes or genetic material present in a cell or organism.
  • boffin (26: The Stuff of Life): a person engaged in scientific or technical research.
  • hirsute (26: The Stuff of Life): hairy
  • Meccano (26: The Stuff of Life): a child's construction set for making mechanical models. Meccano set. plaything, toy - an artifact designed to be played with.
  • homeotic (26: The Stuff of Life): any of a group of genes that control the pattern of body formation during early embryonic development of organisms. These genes encode proteins called transcription factors that direct cells to form various parts of the body.
  • proteome (26: The Stuff of Life):the entire complement of proteins that is or can be expressed by a cell, tissue, or organism.
  • racile g(28: The Mysterious Biped): slender or thin, especially in a charming or attractive way.
  • tars (30: Good-bye):mid 17th century: perhaps an abbreviation of tarpaulin, also used as a nickname for a sailor at this time.
  • osseous (30: Good-bye): consisting of or turned into bone; ossified.

Book References:
  • The Inflationary Universe by George Gamow
  • Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos by Dennis Ovcrbye
  • An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks
  • The Seaman’s Practice by Richard Norwood
  • Longitude by Dava Sobel
  • Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris
  • Dictionary of National Biography
  • Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth by John Playfair
  • A Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations by John Playfair
  • The Silurian System by Roderick Impey Murchison
  • Organic Remains of a Former World by James Parkinson
  • The Principles of Geology by Alec Watt
  • Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton
  • The History of Fishes by William Yarrell, John Richardson
  • Jurassic
  • Annals of the Old Testament
  • Eight Little Piggies by Stephen Jay Gould
  • Time’s Arrow by Stephen Jay Gould
  • On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
  • Histoire Naturelle by Georges-Louis Leclerc
  • Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson
  • Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants
  • The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester
  • Transactions of the Geological Society of London
  • Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex by Gideon Algernon Mantell
  • Churchill’s Medical Directory
  • Terrible Lizard by Deborah Cadbury
  • The Sceptical Chymist by Robert Boyle
  • Physica Subterranea by Becher J J
  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
  • The History and Use of Our Earth’s Chemical Elements by Robert E. Krebs
  • On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances by Jesse Russell
  • E = mc2 by David Bodanis
  • The ABC of Relativity by Bertrand Russell
  • A New System of Chemical Philosophy by John Dalton
  • Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg
  • Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science by Charles H. Hapgood
  • The Origin of Continents and Oceans by Alfred Wegener
  • Principles of Physical Geology by Arthur Holmes
  • The Earth by Harold Jefferies
  • Basin and Range by John McPhee
  • Fossils and the History of Life by George Gaylord Simpson
  • Naked Earth: The New Geophysics by Shawna Vogel
  • Surviving Galeras by Stanley Williams
  • Life at the Extremes by Frances Ashcroft
  • Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
  • Stars Beneath the Sea by Trevor Norton
  • Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • Edge of the Jungle by William Beebe
  • Jungle Days by William Beebe
  • The Universe Below by William J. Broad
  • Cod by Mark Kurlansky
  • Windows into the Earth by Robert B Smith
  • The Blind Watchmaker
  • The Sixth Extinction
  • Life: An Unauthorised Biography
  • On the Origin of Species
  • Wonderful Life
  • The Crucible of Creation
  • Basin and Range
  • Comet
  • Eternal Frontier
  • Birds of Arabia
  • How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts
  • Moss Flora of Britain and Ireland
  • Genera of North American Plants
  • Systema Naturae
  • Historia Generalis Plantarum
  • The Diversity of Life
  • Manual of the Grasses of the United States
  • The Potting-Shed Papers
  • Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology
  • Life: An Unauthorised Biography,
  • Microphagia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Miniature Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses by Robert Hooke
  • On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin
  • Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus
  • Principles of Biology by Herbert Spencer
  • Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers
  • Naval Timber and Arboriculture by Patrick Matthew
  • An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection by Charles Darwin
  • The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
  • The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms by Charles Darwin
  • On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects by Charles Darwin
  • Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin
  • The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom by Charles Darwin
  • The Power of Movement in Plants by Charles Darwin
  • Biology: The Science of Life
  • The Double Helix by James Watson
  • Mathematical Climatology and the Astronomical Theory of Climatic Changes by Milutin Milankovitch
  • Missing Links by John Reader
  • Java Man
  • The Wisdom of the Bones by Alan Walker
  • Extinct Humans by Ian Tattersall
  • The Stages of Evolution by C Loring Brace
  • The Epic of Man by Time-Life
  • The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes
  • A Gap in Nature by Time Flannery
  • American Omithology by Charles WIllson Peale
  • The Sinking Ark by Norman Myers
  • The Diversity of Life: by Edward O. Wilson

Good Quotes:
  • First Line: Welcome
  • Last Line: And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.
  • the absence of evidence is evidence. Quoted from Robert Evans in Chp 3 The Reverend Evans's Universe
  • Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights. Chp 13 Bangl
  • We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way. Chp 23 The Richness of Being


Table of Contents:
  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
  • INTRODUCTION 1
  • PART I LOST IN THE COSMOS 7
    • 1 How to Build a Universe 9
    • 2 Welcome to the Solar System 19
    • 3 The Reverend Evans's Universe 29
  • PART II THE SIZE OF THE EARTH 41
    • 4 The Measure of Things 43
    • 5 The Stone-Breakers 63
    • 6 Science Red in Tooth and Claw 79
    • 7 Elemental Matters 97
  • PART III A NEW AGE DAWNS 113
    • 8 Einstein's Universe 115
    • 9 The Mighty Atom 133
    • 10 Getting the Lead Out 149
    • 11 Muster Mark's Quarks 161
    • 12 The Earth Moves 173
  • PART IV DANGEROUS PLANET 187
    • 13 Bangl 189
    • 14 The Fire Below 207
    • 15 Dangerous Beauty 224
  • PART V LIFE ITSELF 237
    • 16 Lonely Planet 239
    • 17 Into the Troposphere 255
    • 18 The Bounding Main 270
    • 19 The Rise of Life 287
    • 20 Small World 302
    • 21 Life Goes On 321
    • 22 Good-bye to All That 335
    • 23 The Richness of Being 350
    • 24 Cells 371
    • 25 Darwin's Singular Notion 381
    • 26 The Stuff of Life 397
  • PART Vl THE ROAD TO US 417
    • 27 Ice Time 419
    • 28 The Mysterious Biped 434
    • 29 The Restless Ape 453
    • 30 Good-bye 469
  • NOTES 479
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY 517
  • INDEX 529

References:

Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)