A Short History of Nearly Everything

London England: Doubleday, 2003. Hardback. Very slight shelf wear to top edge of D/J. This book is the author's quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how to got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. The author's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as how we known what we know. How do were know what is in the centre of the earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 millions years ago? How did anyone every figure these things out? On his travels through time and space he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, such as the painfully shy Henry Cavendish, who worked out important conundrums including how much the earth weighed, but failed to report many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before. 515 pp. (We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. academic and scholarly books and Modern First Editions etc.). First Edition. Cloth. Fine/Near Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Harback.