A good book
I have been spending my leisure time reading this book called "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. It is very impressive and engaging. It's hard to imagine someone who has the wit to write such things and to present with so much humour and style.
It's basically a book written about science. I considered myself a science person, since I've been heavily trained in science and engineering since young. But never had I look at science in this way, and it makes science a much much more interesting.
For example, how he described the history of Earth:
"If you imagine the 4,500 million years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 am, with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next 16 hours. Not until almost 8:30 pm in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has the Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed 20 min later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 pm, trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 pm plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than 2 hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
Thanks to 10 min or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 pm, the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 pm and hold sway for about 3/4 of an hour. At 21 min to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge 1 min and 17 sec before midnight.
The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day, continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about 3 times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or larger. "
Isn't it amazing how he manage to give us a very good scale of our Earth activities? This is just one of the ingenious writing he has in his books. There are many funny things written too, and there are so many times I wanted to giggle as I read. Imagine you're on a bus with a Auntie sitting opposite you thinking that you're a lunatic laughing to yourself. It's awfully injuring to yourself to hold back the laughter lor.
The only thing I want to complain is that he shouldn't put his own photo inside the book. But I will be continuing reading his books.
posted by WSW at 10:45 PM
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