Book: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Authors: Christopher Martyn
Journal: BMJ (2003)

In 1993, when there was  Tory government in the United Kingdom, the then minister for science, William Waldegrave, issued  challenge to physicists who were lobbying him for money to pay for their colossally expensive experiments. Could they answer, on  single page of A4, the questions: What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it? As it happened, they could, as you can see by going to http://hepwww.ph.qmw.ac.uk/epp/higgs.html. But the incident prompts questions about the way the United Kingdom decides priorities in funding its research. Might it not be better to have  minister who knew something about his portfolio? And it reminds us that even highly educated and intelligent people—Waldegrave is  fellow of All Souls, Oxford—feel no shame about their ignorance of scientific matters. Imagine the derision if he had asked  bunch of literary academics for  one page answer to Who was T S Eliot and why is The Waste Land an important poem?​poem?




Figure 1



Bill Bryson

Doubleday, £20, pp 528 ISBN 0 385 40818 8

Rating: ★




Bill Bryson, bestselling author of travel books, didn't learn much science at school either. He was comfortable with his belief that science was supremely dull. That is until one day, gazing down at the moon-lit Pacific on  long haul flight, an epiphany occurred. How was it, he asked himself, that he could be so uninterested in the workings of the planet that he inhabited? He set out to remedy the deficiency, partly by reading but also by visiting scientists and getting them to explain what they were doing and why they were doing it. He spent three years on his quest—about the same time as an undergraduate course in  scientific subject—and now reckons that he knows enough volcanology, evolutionary biology, and particle physics to explain these things to the rest of us.

The strength of the book is its racy and easy to read style. Bryson is good both on the scientists he has met and the historical figures that he has encountered in his reading. You will enjoy, for example, his description of the Reverend Robert Evans, whose savant skills of spatial memory give him spectacular success in his nightly search for supernovae, or of J B S Haldane who, while researching submarine escape apparatus, showed not the slightest scruple in putting his colleagues and family in harm's way in  decompression chamber.

The trouble is that this is just about the book's only strength. This 500 page volume isn't an exposition of science. It's  bumper book of jaw-dropping facts transformed into  jaunty narrative by  professional writer. There is almost no attempt to explain anything that could be called  scientific principle or to show what follows from it. Newton's universal law of gravitation gets  paragraph; thermodynamics is covered in  footnote. And  number of errors make one wonder whether its author always grasped what he was told. Peter Medawar once epitomised  virus as a piece of bad  wrapped in protein. Bryson calls it  memorable phrase but by misquoting it as a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news robs it of both sense and wit.

There is  famous story, recounted in the book, of how the New York Times, wanting to run  piece on relativity, unaccountably chose its golfing correspondent, Henry Crouch, to interview Einstein. A sensitive man might have detected an uncomfortable parallel. Bryson is cool enough to remark that Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth.