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by Bill Bryson
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A Short History Of Nearly Everything explains everything we’ve learned about our world and the universe so far, including how they formed, how we learned to make sense of time, space and gravity, why it’s such a miracle that we’re alive and how much of our planet is still a complete mystery to us.
A Short History Of Nearly Everything explains everything we’ve learned about our world and the universe so far, including how they formed, how we learned to make sense of time, space and gravity, why it’s such a miracle that we’re alive and how much of our planet is still a complete mystery to us.
A singularity is defined as a moment in which nothing is defined and everything is unpredictable. It’s a massive inflection point. When scientists talk about the “initial” singularity, they refer to the moment the universe was created. It’s hard to imagine, but think of a little, compact point, that is infinitely dense – it contains everything that’s in the universe now, but is compressed into a tiny, tiny dot.
All of a sudden, it explodes, splattering all of its contents into the void. This moment is known as the big bang. When it happened, the entire universe was created in the time it takes you to prepare a sandwich. Immediately after the blow, the universe doubled in size every 10-34 seconds – that’s FAST. Within three minutes, 98% of all matter in the universe we know today was created.
With all this expanding, how wide is the universe today? About 100 billion light years – that’s the distance light can travel in a year times 100 BILLION. And light is fast. It travels 300,000 km (or 186,000 miles) per second. That’s this much in a year: 9,460,800,000,000 or about 9.5 trillion.
So 9.5 trillion times 100 billion, that’s the diameter of the universe. In numbers (whatever that means), that’s the span in kilometers: 946,800,000,000,000,000,000,000.
If you think about how easy it is to die, it becomes clear how frail human life actually is. I mean, you fall down a couple stairs, hit your head, and that’s it. You dive too deep in the sea, climb too high on a mountain or get stung by the wrong plant or insect, and you’re done. But an even bigger surprise than us managing to maneuver the dangerous world we live in every day is the fact that we’re here at all. 99.5% of earth’s habitable space is not suited for humans – because it’s either water or doesn’t have enough oxygen. We need land to move and live and even on land we’re limited: only 12% of the total land mass of our planet can host humans. It’s pretty rare for a planet to be livable on in general, because several things have to come together: The distance to a star must be perfect. If it’s too close, the surface burns, if it’s too far away, the planet will be iced over. The planet has to keep out cosmic…
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Get the complete summary in the appAll it took to create most of the universe as we know it was a single, 3-minute moment.
The odds of a planet supporting life are so low that our presence on earth comes close to a miracle.
There’s a lot that could go wrong for our planet, which makes every new day a gift.
"A Short History Of Nearly Everything" is a strong fit if you want practical ideas around history, humor, science—especially themes like all it took to create most of the universe as we know it was a single, 3-minute moment; the odds of a planet supporting life are so low that our presence on earth comes close to a miracle. The MinuteRead summary distills these concepts into a focused read, whether you're deciding whether to buy the book or applying its lessons at work.
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. Settled in England for many years, he moved to America with his wife and four children for a few years ,but has since returned to live in the UK. His bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes From a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. His acclaimed work of popular science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize, and was the biggest selling non-fiction book of the decade …
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