Reddit reviews A Short History of Nearly Everything
We found 76 Reddit comments about A Short History of Nearly Everything. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Blue and white hardcover with gilt lettering. Dark blue jacket with pictureif tge earth. White lettering. 544 pages
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
I haven't quite finished it (it's rather long) but so far it is fantastic.
Bill Bryson is the man. I don't know if he is a "Super Dad" I'm making him out to be, but I hope so. I've only read the one book though..
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a very good read.
Some of it isn't exactly correct but it is easy and fun to read and you'll definitely learn something:
A Short History of Nearly Everything
A short history of nearly everything
While it might not change the way he sees the world it'll definitely help him see it more clearly.
I'll read damn near anything I can get my hands on, but I prefer fiction.
Some non-fiction books that I'm currently enjoying though are Godel, Escher, Bach and A Short History of Nearly Everything
On the fiction list right now are Foucault's Pendulum and The Broom of the System.
If you are interested in such questions, and science generally, I recommend Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book starts off discussing this exact question.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
a really good starting book is
A short history of nearly everything
author Bill Bryson (born in Des Moines, Iowa, living in the UK most of his life) discovered he knew next to nothing about how stuff works. How we know things. Not because of a religious upbringing, but just because he was a hardcore linguist and had never studied science subjects. So he did what he does best, research and ask tons of people about everything and then he wrote a book.
And what a book! To quote the first 5 star reviewer in view on amazon: (almost everybody gives it 5 stars)
>" I cannot think of any other single-volume book I have ever read that was as informative, entertaining, and broad in scope as this classic. Not having excelled in science, nor been much interested in it when I was younger, this gem is a massive refresher course on everything I ever learned about science, and then some."
This book is an excellent introduction in every scientific subject you can think of and dozens others you never heard of. After reading it you can select those fields of study that interest you most and find books by scientists in that field that go deeper.
There are many editions of this book, including a fully illustrated one.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
This is super entertaining and interesting. It covers so many topics, that it's almost impossible to get bored with it
I love Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
Funny, interesting and educating.
http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/atheism#RecommendedReading
also.. here is my own list of things I've actually personally read and recommend.
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469
http://www.amazon.com/Letter-Christian-Nation-Sam-Harris/dp/0307265773
http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060738170
http://www.amazon.com/Some-Mistakes-Moses-Robert-Ingersoll/dp/0879753617
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868
http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-23-Chapters/dp/0060194979
A short history of nearly everything
A Short History of Nearly Everything
SCIENCE.
Short History of Nearly Everything
Have you read A Short History Of Nearly Everything? It's an awesome read about, well a short history of nearly everything. From the beginning of time. It's great and Bill Bryson really does a great job of making light of topics that are usually "too dense" for non-science people.
I recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me or Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything. If you are looking for something a little more scholarly and drier then I suggest A History of Knowledge by Van Doren. As a world history teacher myself, I loved all of these books.
I've been on a non-fiction kick myself.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is good. Very funny, very informative.
Packing for Mars and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers both by Mary Roach were also fun to read.
Came here to post this. Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a great way for the layman to become scientifically literate, and it's entertaining. I like all of Krakauer's works, but would particularly recommend Where Men Win Glory for a perspective on the war in Afghanistan as well as a portrait of Pat Tillman, a complicated man.
A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Yes and yes.
Ooooh, just one? Just a mention that I am atheist, though none of these are really directly in favor of atheism :)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle/dp/0345409469
http://www.amazon.com/Genome-The-Autobiography-Species-Chapters/dp/0060932902
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868
http://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/dp/0345342968
http://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060929871
I think A Short History of Nearly Everything might be what you are looking for.
Not sure it will 100% meet your needs but a great book nonetheless and worth a read.
To know why what you are saying doesn't make sense you need to read a very large amount of physcis books, may i suggest starting at Bill Bryson's a short history of nearly everything then moving on to Stephen Hawking's a short history of time
It's more of a general all-about-science book, but Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. It was years ago that I read it but it has some really interesting sections about geology and biology if I recall correctly.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. It has similar humor to Adams and it discusses really large concepts in a way that's easy to understand and from interesting perspectives. Worth reading for sure!
While it does have its inaccuracies, check out A Short History of Nearly Everything. You'll walk away with a list a mile long of more awesome things you want to read about.
Best general science book: A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson.
I'd recommend you read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It's a pretty good survey of natural science and very accessible to the layman. I think I've read it twice and each time come away with that "everything in the universe is awesome" feeling. It's probably my favorite non-fiction overall.
I suggest Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. He's a travel writer who wanted to know the same things, so he asked every smart person he could find and distilled it into layman's terms, while maintaining a level of brevity that Sagan often lacked.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0767908171
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Sounds like it will be right up your alley.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is very good and a bit more up-to-date (it's a book not a TV series), and I speak as someone who has read the book of Cosmos several times.
Brian Green's The Elegant Universe is worth reading, even if you think String Theory is "Not Even Wrong" (Greene is not one of the die-hards).
My favorites... the first two are not even talking about religion, but simply pure science and fascinating.... the second starts off about UFOs but then goes into being critical of religion (while barely... it's sagan after all, it's enough to turn off a non-questioning christian).
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-23-Chapters/dp/0060194979
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469
Beyond that, all of Malcom Gladwell's stuff is interesting and about science/sociology so it's a great read and a lot of is down to earth and so will pick at the fundamentalist belief some... eg:
http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017922/
I haven't read any of the typical atheist books as it would be preaching to the choir so to speak, but I really enjoyed these three which are pure awesome.
http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-23-Chapters/dp/0060194979
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
I second the reading idea! Ask your history or science teachers for suggestions of accessible books. I'm going to list some that I found interesting or want to read, and add more as I think of them.
A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. Title explains it all. It is very beginner friendly, and has some very entertaining stories. Bryson is very heavy on the history and it's rather long but you should definitely make every effort to finish it.
Lies my teacher told me
The greatest stories never told (This is a whole series, there are books on Presidents, science, and war as well).
There's a series by Edward Rutherfurd that tells history stories that are loosely based on fact. There are books on London and ancient England, Ireland, Russia, and one on New York
I read this book a while ago and loved it- Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk It's about a monk who was imprisoned for 30 years by the Chinese.
The Grapes of Wrath.
Les Misérables. I linked to the unabridged one on purpose. It's SO WORTH IT. One of my favorite books of all time, and there's a lot of French history in it. It's also the first book that made me bawl at the end.
You'll also want the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Federalist Papers.
I'm not sure what you have covered in history, but you'll definitely want to find stuff on all the major wars, slavery, the Bubonic Plague, the French Revolution, & ancient Greek and Roman history.
As for science, find these two if you have any interest in how the brain works (and they're pretty approachable).
Phantoms in the brain
The man who mistook his wife for a hat
Alex and Me The story of a scientist and the incredibly intelligent parrot she studied.
For a background in evolution, you could go with The ancestor's tale
A biography of Marie Curie
The Wild Trees by Richard Preston is a quick and easy read, and very heavy on the adventure. You'll also want to read his other book The Hot Zone about Ebola. Absolutely fascinating, I couldn't put this one down.
The Devil's Teeth About sharks and the scientists who study them. What's not to like?
I'm in the middle of Bill Bryson's book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. He spends a lot of time talking about the people behind important scientific discoveries, and how they all intertwine into our current understanding of the universe. There's a great chapter on nuclear physics which my post is a rough and dirty summary of. :-)
Some great history books:
The first and last are not military history but are quite a good and different reads for someone interested in history and facts.
Have you read Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything? Bill's a writer who pondered the same questions you've been pondering, and set out to learn exactly how he, and all people, came to be, beginning with the start of the universe and running through to the scientific discoveries and pioneers which enabled the modern age. It's a book I'd recommend to anyone, and one I especially think you would relate to, learn from, and enjoy.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly everything. Really, really fucking awesome.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is also awesome (someone else already responded with Stephen Hawking's book of almost the same name).
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
A Short History of Nearly Everything with the errata as annotations.
Also, The Hitchhiker's Guide series is awesome, so that's on the list, too.
Plenty more recommendations, of course, but those two are my go-to books.
Edit. To continue:
Thanks for storing my reading list.
Go pick up a copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything
It contains such gems as the fact that the same person who created CFCs was also responsible for creating leaded gasoline.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is a good read on natural history. Bryson has actually done some solid research for it, but still manages to be conversational.
You might enjoy A Short History of Nearly Everything
A Short History of Nearly Everything & Compass of Pleasure
It's not JUST about Geology, but still...
I'm currently reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is really about science and history of science in general. Not very in-depth or technical about any particular subject, but a great read.
Well there's the sequel of course: Superfreakonomics. And everything by Malcom Gladwell kind of falls into the same genre: The Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink... Then there's The Long Tail by Chris Anderson of Wired and Bad Science by The Guardian's Ben Goldacre....
A Short History of Nearly Everything is also absolutely brilliant 'popular science' but not as 'generation now' as the ones above.
That's just top of my head. All of these books are a few years old but still a great read. I'd say they're all typical Redditor reading if that makes sense.
So good, i would read this by him as well
You should read the book.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
Do you have an aversion to Amazon?
Amazon
$21.00 for a hard cover edition.
This story is covered in Bill Bryson's book: http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
I highly recommend you all read it! It is a very informative but fun to read book! READ IT! And lots of other Bryson books are pretty good...
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Indeed. The plate tectonic theory is relatively young (not until the last half century was there even evidence starting to accumulate); but the theory dates back nearly 100 years.
Aerik is just being facetious, but really only those in school within the last 40 years or so would have been introduced to the theory. And when we are, we're taught the concept more as a matter fact, such that it would be obvious to anyone who thought about it for more than 5 minutes; but many experts rejected the notion for a long time.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, has a great chapter, about the scientists who really pushed the idea.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
Also, Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified by Richard Wolfson. Both were really good books.
Another good book that gives a decent overview (Of everything really) is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything basically what the title says;
Where Men Win Glory about the Afganistan War and Pat Tillman, or really anything by Jon Krakauer (I loved his Everest book and the one on radical Mormon religion);
Newjack by Ted Conover, Conover became a corrections officer at Sing Sing prison and wrote about his experiences,
The Ghost Map about the start of epidemiology and how we started tracking viruses.
All of them are great reads where you also learn.
you should give a Short History of Nearly Everything a read. he goes over in glorious and awed detail every major discipline of science and does his best to tie them all together and show how perspectives have changed through history.
Bryson has the advantage of not being a scientist, so he asked the sort of seemingly stupid questions you're no doubt having trouble with and then he is a really a very engaging writer too. highly recommended.
also, you can take a community college class on Biological Anthropology, or any beginning anthropology class really and they will teach you all about where you came from. this is also highly recommended.
What about A Short History of Nearly Everything? Or Seal Team Six? Or The Magicians? What about American Gods, Hyperspace and The Grand Design
What I'm saying is 18 is too few. Get cracking.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
PM if you are interested.
I would also throw in that if she IS interested in our planet and science then Bill Bryson has a lovely book that, while not purely about evolution, is about how science has discovered many many facts about our planet and so in many ways it provides the reader with the scientific history to make sense of things like the age of the earth and the discoveries related to evolution: http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
As per http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171 there was a significant decrease in anti-microbial activity of clothes washing with the advent of detergents which clean at cold or warm temperatures. As the author describes (if I remember correctly) at the scale of the germs in the fibers, it would be like an adult human wrapped in cargo nets. You simply need to kill/injure the organisms with heat.
Question: does Bill Bryson get credit for having written a book that quite nearly approximates the title of this little screed?
Answer: to my mind, yes. Bryson published said book several years before this bit was made and while he doesn't pretend to be a scientist, he does interview many of the world's leading thinkers and writes lucidly and intelligently and humorously about how a variety of complex concepts can be understood by lay-people.
Edit: oh yeah, here's the link to Bryson's book.
Bill Bryson has some answers. I found this on reddit from people recommending books. This book is awesome and will help with all questions regarding that and then some http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
> The original claim is that anyone can be great at anything. It's wishy-washy feel-good bullshit.
keep believing this and you are guaranteed to never be great at anything.
> Just because you paint, doesn't mean you are a great painter.
you think anybody thought jackson pollock would be famous? he threw random paint all over a canvas
> Just because you play guitar, doesn't mean a stadium-full of people will pay to hear you play.
nickelback. creed. limp bizkit. billy ray cyrus.
> You can't get up tomorrow and decide to run 100m faster than Usain Bolt - no matter how hard you try, you'll never get there
have you tried? michael johnson ran every day for 4 hours or more.
> Practice all you want, you'll never play in a Superbowl-winning team
kurt warner was a grocery stocker and busted his ass in the arena football league to get his start
> ever make scientific contributions on a par with Hawking.
read this book. its filled to the brim with scientists who started out of their garage or workshop and did amazing things that changed the world
> The fact that you think the number of notches on your bedpost is in any way the mark of a great man
great men are made by trying, failing, trying, failing, and trying some more, and none of them had the ridiculous attitude that being great at anything for anyone is wishy washy bullshit. if that is really what you believe, then you have guaranteed you will never be great at anything
I don't have the book to hand to check for the exact quote (and his references) but the excellent pop-sci A Short History of Nearly Everything mentions this in a similar context, but notes that a certain amount of time has to pass to ensure complete dispersal of the atoms in question.
So while it might be true of things some thousand years ago, the probability of this being true for this a maximum of ~3-4 decades is significantly decreased.
Obviously the type of element is going to matter a lot - solids migrate slower than liquids, and much slower than gases, but I'm not even sure how you'd put a proper number on it.
This seems like something of a Fermi Problem to me. It's quite possible that Avogadro wins, and 10^23 * $really_small_probability has in fact happened.
I strongly recommend A Short History of Nearly Everything. The guy does excellent job to go through a lot of stuff, including life.
I will drill on the "to develop" part of your question.
Basically, life as it exists now (and including us) had astonishingly "lucky" brakes. Even global disasters were needed to progress thus far. Having in mind that, I think it is very hard to define what would be better (e.g. there were stages when Earth's atmosphere would be deadly for most modern organisms, but life was present even there and probably in huge amount). Maybe some compounds/conditions would be more beneficial to life but in a lab environment. Our planet was far from that.
Another good point is that life's primary goal seems just "to be". Nothing more, nothing less. In this sense all those coincidences were neither "astonishingly", nor "lucky".
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Not so much antitheist, but I found it a good place to start in terms of "big history." Some of the language is tempered--it won't be as hard hitting as any Dawkins book--but it does a good job of covering the basics, and gives a general overview of how cumulative scientific knowledge got us where we are now.
A Short History Of Nearly Everything*
Science & history & personal anecdotes mixed to make for fascinating
Reading.
H2G2
Learn to laugh.
The Giving Tree
Taught me more about being a kind, friendly person that anything else.
You will notice the absence of A short history of nearly everything, which is a good book, but frankly it didn't speak very much to me. Bryson is almost only interested in geography.
I just finished Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book explains the important scientific discoveries about life, geology, and astronomy; but also the stories of the scientists who came up with these discoveries.
I got the audiobook, and it made my commute seem much shorter. It's a little dry in a few bits (especially the parts about geology), but overall it's a good, entertaining read.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is a book written specifically for this purpose! And the audiobook is excellent.
Posting from my phone so can't make a link, but here's the amazon listing.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
Can't suggest it strongly enough, it was literally written for people asking exactly this. Just listen to the forward; the wording is absurdly similar to your post.
Breaking away from fiction, I had to read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson who did a lot of books on traveling, which are a hoot to read, as is the above science book.
Guns Germs and Steel
A Short History of Nearly Everything
A Briefer History of Time
The Magic of Reality
Give her Bill Bryson's a Short History of Nearly Everything. It's extremely interesting and well written...and mentions evolution in a thought out way that leads to the conclusion that its pretty much the only way it could have logically happened...not in a smug way...in an explanatory way that just describes how the whole thing works so that its not a vague idea that can be readily dismissed.
Also: Pokemon.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
So it's settled. Humphrey Davy may have pulled a Romney and flip-flopped but that does not excuse the fact that Britain decided to ignore that the word had been changed. Get over yourselves and start pronouncing it THE RIGHT WAY!
On another note... If you don't read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything you are severely missing out on how fucking cool everything is.
Not at all. What has been proven, has been proven. It exists as a base for progress until it is proven otherwise. It is funny that you mention 2+2 because math is axiomatic and can only be proven within a system. Even the most basic math is subject to scrutiny under different circumstances.
Here are a few books you might enjoy:
Hyperspace
A Short History of Nearly Everything
They explore some ideas I think you might like. I'm not an idiot, even though it is clear you think so. I just don't like rational. It is boring.