Book review of A short history of Nearly Everything

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Introduction
There are questions that regard how the world came into existence as it is today. Even today, a majority of the facts that we used to explain existence are theories, and there is barely anything conclusively agreed upon as evidence is still coming up. Part of the reasons for this is that we are gradually advancing in technology which allows humanity to delve into practices that were previously thought impossible. As a result, what is taken as biblical truth today may shift within a span of one finding that definitively contradicts earlier research. However, the reality is still fascinating as it is today and the explanation of how events came to be should be a topic of concern for anyone interested in understanding existence. Bill Bryson does a wonderful job in putting together a collection of some of the most interesting global phenomenon. In what is a sometimes chilling explanation of how human beings could suddenly come to extinction through an asteroid-earth collision, Bryson manager to maintain an overall humorous account of events that is both informative and delightful to read. An analysis of few chapters illustrates the brilliance of his work below.
The Earth Moves
In the Earth moves, Bryson does a wonderful job in giving a summary of events that has led to the belief of how the planets came to be positioned where they are today. The discussion starts with Albert Einstein’s forward to a book. This is important because Einstein is undoubtedly one of the most renowned scientists and his views are respected across the globe.

However, when he wrote this forward, the world was still gravely misinformed about the positioning of the continental plates and in his foreword, he credits the wrong observation. This foreword supported Hagwood in a book where the latter concentrated on denouncing an earlier notion that the earth’s crust moves.
Hagwood had been motivated to write such a rebuttal by the findings of a young geologist named Tylor who had speculated that continents had once been a single land mass and then moved apart. However, this was not readily believed. Soon after, a German meteorologist known as Wegener supported these findings. In his book, he determined that Tylor’s idea was the only reason that rocks were similar in the opposite sided of the ocean and similar animals could be found on different sides of the ocean in coasts that were thousands of miles from each other. Despite the plausibility of these findings, there was great resistance that was according to Bryson born of the fact that Wegener was neither a geologist, not from a favorable country. Geologists from across the global thus produced numerous contradictory theories attempting to explain the phenomena that Wegener sought to explain with his theory.
The majority of the proposed solutions were ridiculous in nature. For example, scientists introduced land mass bridge connecting any two areas where similar animals were found to have existed at one time simultaneously. This attempt had two grave insufficiencies. First of all, it did not explain how these bridges then disappeared to. If indeed it was a single bridge, it would have been plausible to give some reason for its disappearance. However, the disappearance of multiple bridges that were thousands of miles long without a trace seemed illogical. Another problem was the fact that those animals that supposedly crossed these bridged failed to navigate too few hundred miles of terrestrial land to the other side of the land space. Wegener was also short of ideas on how to explain the cause of these movements. Also, his statistical information was extremely inaccurate with some data indicating that Greenland was shifting 1 mile westwards annually while the actual figure is about half an inch.
After a period of denial, Holmes boosted this idea by determining that radioactivity within the earth’s crust could result in convectional movements within the earth’s crust which could cause continents to drift from each other. Even Holmes was opposed by Hagwood and especially by geologists across America. Other questions like where sediments that were carried to the oceanic floor by rivers went remained unanswered. The inopportune Second World War afforded Harry Hess the opportunity to lead a sea ship equipped with the capability to measure the depth of the oceans. He used for scientific purposes to discover that the oceanic floor was relatively new and devoid of sediments. Later he carried our individual research that unmasked vast ranges at the floor of the ocean. He thus came up with the theory that the Atlantic Ocean acted as a conveyor belt where at the center, oceanic floors were youngest and grew older nearer the edges to the continental crust. According to this, the sediments then lasted long enough to form part of the continental land mass.
Soon after came the findings of magnetic fields and their relevance to determining the position of North Pole at their time of formation. These important findings were ignored, and so was the discovery that European magnetic fields fit exactly together with those of North America from the same time. However, in 1963, Drummond-Mathews and Fred Vine used the magnetic fields to eventually demonstrate definitively that the earth did move in the way that Hess had explained. Eventually, in 1964, the world settled on the idea that the earth crust is moving. This changed the idea of Holmes that only the continental plates move and thus the nature of these movements were given the new description of ‘plate tectonics.’ This idea has been advanced further, and there are constant astonishing discoveries of the extent of these shifts. However, there are still many phenomena that are not explained by plate tectonics such as the constant rising of Denver and South Africa and the tilting of Australia. The emergence of forms of life is in areas where it cannot be explained by perceived tectonic movements also puts suspicion on this theory. Besides, the effect of these movements on the biological diversity and intelligence as well as why this phenomenon is not present in some planets is still a mystery.
Bang
In this vivid and perhaps petrifying chapter, Bryson looks at the occurrence of meteor craters and the effects of a possible return of such an event. The chapter begins with events in Iowa which is a normal rather dull city with about 3000 people. Nobody had anticipated there could be anything out of the ordinary in the town even when a good driller reported strange stones blowing up from the well. A set of geologists that were sent to observe the phenomenon reported back that the rocks must have resulted from volcanic activity in the ancient times. This was despite the fact that there was no known volcanic activity in the area. There are many factors that made the findings of the driller not acquire the attention they deserved. The primary reason was that this was happening in a rather lazy town where nothing geologically important ever happened. As a result, even the geological department was ill-equipped for any venturous excursion. The second reason was that over the course of many years after the impact, the formed crater had been filled with sediments and glacial. Trees had grown and given the magnitude of the crater; no one would be able detect that the entire area was a crater.
This changed with the arrival of the scientist named Shoemaker who had already come into contact with geologist Gilbert’s claim that asteroids could collide with the earth. His observation of the area around the crater determines that there were numerous deposits of Silica and magnetites. His was enough to suggest that the crater was formed by some form of impact from an object from space. This created so much excitement from him that he decided to dedicate considerable time to studying the solar system that had fallen out of fashion in the science arena. His study specialized n checking the exact number of asteroids are in a community. In the research, they understood that contrary to former knowledge, there were about a billion of asteroids in the solar system. These are all materials with the capacity to collide with the earth since they cross the earth’s orbit at extremely high speeds and without any intelligence about possible impact. These findings were intriguing as concerns the welfare of the planet and its inhabitants. Based on their calculations a collision with a small asteroid could cause grand destruction on the earth’s surface. The threat was exacerbated by the speed with which these moving objects move which increases the momentum with which they collide. An asteroid that had been moving conspicuously around Jupiter was monitored to try and model the events that may occur if there was a meteor collision on the earth’s surface.
The results of these collisions were far from the anticipate drizzle that would live Jupiter without a scar. It was observed that one of the asteroids that were approximately the size of a house hit Jupiter with such force that it created a hole equal to the size of the earth. This was not the only striking statistic from this event. Another strange factor was the fact that although the object had been conspicuous since the 1920’s, it took more than half a century to notice is the ambiguous trend. This added something else to the risk associated with meteorite collisions. If the objects were missed by the telescopes, they would then be visible to the human eye one second before impact upon entry into the atmosphere. Besides, the speed would compress air so much that it would fry everything beneath it and crush whatever was remaining. Furthermore, the meteorite itself would melt straight away and raise enough dust to devastate the entire world.
Walter Alvarez initiates a research that explained the even better magnitude of destruction that could be expected from such an event. In his geological ventures, he discovered a continuous layer of clay that fell in between limestone layers. He was intrigued by the fact that this layer of clay was occurring around the same age with the period when dinosaurs became extinct. Seeking the assistant of the father, they were able to get the sample tested which gave a particular anomalous result. It was obvious that this dust must have come from earth’s impact with an object from space. This phenomena way as yet unexplained with Alvarez explaining that the meteor was as close to the atmosphere as possible. He also suggested that this was possible the reason for the extreme. After rigorous research, it was concluded that even through the collision with Iowa has not led to the diminishment of dinosaurs, and it was more likely to have grave impacts on the others surface. Luckily, no species had become extinct from this impact. From these finds, Bryson estimated the risk on the earth’s surface if another collision occurred. The result would be a disastrous catastrophe that neither the administration could anticipate.
The Fire Below
The fire below, on the other hand, is a dedicated narrative on the interior of the earth’s surface. According to Bryson, Man has been excessively modest is studying the surface of the earth. In fact, more resources have gone to studying the space resulting in a duration where more of what is inside the sun’s inner circle that we know about the entire earth’s crust. His tale begins with a young and excited geologist Voorhies who had bumped into a rhino’s skeleton on his visits to look for interesting stones in this area. His trip was halted when following this skeleton he bumped into millions of other bones of animals that seemed to have been buried arrive. A study of the bones revealed something even more disturbing. These animals had not died instantly but had suffered a slow and agonizing death over breathing problems. The cause of the health problem was not difficult to establish as the organisms were covered by a layer of ashes.
A simple statistic indicates that these ashes were from volcanic activity. This was intriguing because Nebraska has not received any volcanic eruption and thus volcanic ashes were likely to have originated quite further. Provoked by a television interview on the occurrence of the ash, Voorhies sent samples of the ash to laboratories across the state to ensure that maximum care and observation was taken to describe the ashes. Among the samples sent, one of the scientists wrote a responded with the fact that the ashes were similar to those of other eruptions further eastwards. The animals had been killed by a single eruption that happened far away. This introduced a compelling nature of the earth’s crust and the pent-up energy below it.
Bryson records some various that have been tried towards understanding the lower of the earth’s crust. Some scientists analyzing the entire strength of a volcanic eruption have witnessed a strange deflection of the waves on a Ritcher scale. This led to the understanding of the fact that the earth’s crust is made of layers. This was still very insufficient information regarding the surface of mass on whose all life depends on. Other organizations thus began ventures that were determined at producing an understanding of the crust. The idea behind this was that a slight understanding of the stones that formed the crust would vastly enable human beings to predict the interactions within these materials and thus predict possible disastrous events.
In the west, scientists attempted to extract materials from the mantle of the earth’s crust through the seabed, but material incapacity rendered this impossible. The Soviets were more determined and tried it on terrestrial space. After a little over 12km, the scientist stopped with various discoveries. These environments were much hotter that anticipated and they certainly had more water than previously thought possible. As usual, the difficulties left the team disillusioned as speculations had proven to be gravely misunderstood. However, on thing remained true, the earth’s crust was made up of rings, and each was made up of several layers. It also led to the discovery that the layers held up a substantial amount of energy as heat. These temperatures usually cause convectional movements that are often the cause of unfortunate events.
In many cases, the shift in hot flowing substances within the earth’s crust led to a buildup of pressure that was enough to blast up the earth into another mountainous region. Sometimes when these movements were at the joining of two tectonic rocks, their pressure of the moving tectonics, the pressure would rise until one of the plates was going to give way. In most cases, this buildup of pressure would cause earthquakes of considerable magnitude. The higher the pent up energy which is insignificant compared to ant current values, the more likely the damage which is to be incurred flowing the earthquake. Various earthquakes have reduced the notion of less impact traditional beliefs. Some earthquakes have been so powerful they threatened the entire existence of a town. Some towns such as Tokyo which lies at the merging of three tectonic faults are at risk. Since the buildup pressure must always be released, it is anticipated that the town is waiting to come down in rubles.
Another myth that exists regards the inability of man to predict accurately the warnings that are indicated for caution against possible eruptions. In numerous events in the past, numerous geologists and volcanologists have burned up in flames while attempting to study volcanoes at close range. In these events, the interpretations of signs had misdirected the individuals to think that the eruptions are still very far. For this reason, there is the need to be much investment in this area to come up with more elaborate scales of determining of the possible eruptions and the magnitude scale of the expected eruption. This can help to save life significantly.
Dangerous Beauty
This chapter is dedicated to the feature that is both the characteristics that are presented in the heading. First of all, the Yellowstone is truly beautiful. The area around it is laden with small mountains, brilliant vegetation and numerous of hot pools. The area, therefore, has thousands of tourists every year who come to bask in the glory of a park. In most cases, however, eh park remains filled with hundreds of academic tourists who want to carry out educational excursions. Bryson himself shudders at the vision of one of the fissures that could go off at any time and was often occupied by one group of the campers or the other. The park was thus undoubtedly dangerous owing that it is the largest active volcano in the world. It is difficult to imagine te magnitude of such information to an individual who just discovers it.
The peculiar nature of Yellowstone Park begins with a geologist who is not satisfied by the image of the overall area that he gets. Understanding the nature of the formation styles meant that it had to result in a crater or a caldera. However, the geologist was unable to find these features anywhere in the pack. After various futile efforts, his efforts were rescued by a governmental organization that decided to take photographs of an area. These photos finally captured what Christiansen was looking for. The entire park was a creator. The reason why the amusing park he had not anticipated the grand size of the creator is because it was more that it could be humanly recognizable. This caused a chilling sensation for even the producers. To have formulated such a feature, the pressure builds up underneath the surface would have to be very high. This intrigued Christiansen, and he began research around the Yellowstone. This cornerstone would soon be removed from the list of traditional super volcanoes to be put in the active volcanoes list. Indeed, it is the largest active volcano today. Being situated on top of magma that was 125 miles deep, the pressure builds up below the surface was capable of blowing up the entire park and areas nearby into pieces. Professor McGuire projected that the eruption of the area would expel people up to a radius of 1000 km and the repercussions of the emissions from such a volcano.
There are other numerous super flumes on the earth’s, and thus the Yellowstone phenomena had been studied for an entire vast of time in the past. However, there was a major difference between Yellowstone and the others. Yellowstone is the only super flume that is one the terrestrial land. For this reason, it reacted overwhelmingly differently from other super flumes and one hence not very easy to analyze. Among the scant information that is available is the fact that continental crust in this area was extremely thin. It is not yet geologically explained. While some speculate that the unbearable heat beneath the crust is responsible for the thinness of the rock, others think that the magma is particularly thin because of the immense temperatures below the earth’s surface. The data regarding is capacity or power with which it can explode with is surprisingly scant. Discovered around 6.5million of ago, the volcano was to known to have caused extensive damage. Among these the last which was known magnitude was very high. The magnitude was 2500 times higher than that of Mt. Helena explosion. It is thus believed to be fast approaching the eruption day. There are those where are designated into the forests, and one cannot do anything to harm. Even so, currently, the plan of action is oblivious because of the scant information available anywhere that can assist understand the possible nature if what err rated. The main problem can be anyone within the United States for an unspecified length of time. The continuous lack of delivery elongates the time increases. Beginning a while ago, the profile of the cornerstones has kept tilting. This has tilted one of the lakes unnaturally that it drains silently into another drain. With all these signs, it is notable that a tragedy may be looming. However, it is still not enough to conceive the probable action of the volcano in the next years. This is because it contains all the signs that would indicate that an eruption is imminent. Failure of one to report such a cause can hence be seen as hazardous. On a positive note, life is expected to be perpetuated safely under the dark, foggy companion.
Ice Time
The ice time is also a great chapter from Bryson explains the elusive act of the ice age. The Ice age is a topic of significant interest in the modern word. Most of the current interest stems from its connection to climate change. In a political frenzy, opponents have jaded each other simply as a result of often heatedly rejected the other parties propositions. This is because while some scientists concentrated on the effects of global warming especially in the melting of the glacial ices, others took the stance that Ice Age was a natural event that must occur and recur and his climate change was not human made. The reality of this is still not very clear, and there are various conflicts within the scientific arena concerning the challenge,
According to Bryson, Ice Age is indeed a reality. It supposedly occurs when some of the ice does not melt during the summer for some reason. This ice will hence reflect sunlight and create cooler summers and will last longer than ice is supposed to remain on the surface of the earth. Bryson states that this process is self-enlarging and unstoppable which means that once the initial cooler summer has taken place, the entire globe will continue getting colder and colder until ice age returns. On the other hand, the world can experience consecutive steamy hot days which are the opposite of ice age. Both of these activities are likely to be inhabitable for the human race and are likely to lead to extinction over time.
To come to this conclusion, Bryson begins his study with the analysis of events in Indonesia where a volcanic eruption caused subsequent cooler summers where spring and summer never came. These were among the most devastating periods for farmers across the globe and especially in Europe where thousands of people died from hunger and disease. Such is the fragility of the human system that has been built on the cyclic events and thus in many cases is not prepared for a shock event. While in those days speculations loomed over the cause of the event, Agassiz began to understand the relevance of glacier on the entire human system and thus begun his research on the area. According to him, glaciers were a strong force that could move boulders and rocks over long distances. The majority of the world and especially Europe was still not ready for such new and therefore Agassiz was rejected and moved by most of the fellow scientists.
However, other scientists began accepting the phenomena with Lyell acknowledging some rocks near his family estate as the undoubted work of glacier erosions. Agassiz had also moved to the US where his opinions were more readily accepted. In fact, the scientist was so much venerated that when he dies, Harvard University replaced his position with three professors. During his stay in the US, his research led him to more temperate regions where upon discovering some forms of ice in these areas, he conclusively decided that ice was once a global phenomenon. Since he lacked the scientific foundation to base his findings to, Agassiz began attributing ice age to divine interventions which of course did not sit well with science.
James Croll, a janitor in a European university, was the first person to crack the code to cyclic weather patterns claiming that the elliptical nature of the earth’s orbit around the sun determined how much sunlight it received and consequently how hoe the earth could become. Milankovitch advanced the theory further by tirelessly computing the angles required to determine the overall time taken for the event to recur. Finally, dating methods allowed these efforts to be approved it the 80’s.
There are still challenges at accepting the coherency of the Ice age. For example, the concept suggests an entirely frozen globe while geological shreds of evidence show biological support around the equator. It is also difficult to explain how the earth warmed again after ice age as all the heat would be reflected back on the ice.
Conclusion
Bill Bryson does a terrific job at collecting pieces of evidence of unique factors in the planet today. His collection is informative and entertaining to read. He has a superb way of combining humor and facts even while describing the most horrific possibilities for human extinctions. The History of nearly everything is this a worth Events dictionary that science enthusiasts should have.