A Short History of Nearly Everything.
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Bindung: Taschenbuch
EAN: 9780552151740
Ausgabe: Export Ed
ISBN: 0552151742
Label: Random House UK
Hersteller: Random House UK
Anzahl Seiten: 688
Erscheinungsdatum: 2004-05
Herausgeber: Random House UK
Studio: Random House UK
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Produktbeschreibung:Amazon.co.uk:What on earth is Bill Bryson doing writing a book of popular science--
A Short History of Almost Everything? Largely, it appears, because this inquisitive, much-travelled writer realised, while flying over the Pacific, that he was entirely ignorant of the processes that created, populated and continue to maintain the vast body of water beneath him.
In fact, it dawned on him that "I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on". The questions multiplied: What is a quark? How can anybody know how much the Earth weighs? How can astrophysicists (or whoever) claim to describe what happened in the first gazillionth of a nanosecond after the Big Bang? Why can't earthquakes be predicted? What makes evolution more plausible than any other theory? In the end, all these boiled down to a single question--how do scientists do science? To this subject Bryson devoted three years of his life, reading books and journals and pestering the people who know (or at least argue about it); and we non-scientists should be pretty grateful to him for passing his findings on to us.
Broadly, his investigations deal with seven topics, all of enormous interest and significance: the origins of the universe; the gradual historical discovery of the size and age of the earth (and the beginnings of the awesome notion of deep time); relativity and quantum theory; the present and future threats to life and the planet; the origins and history of life (dinosaurs, mass extinctions and all); and the evolution of man. Within each of these, he looks at the history of the subject, its development into a modern discipline and the frameworks of theory that now support it. This is a pretty broad brief (life, the universe and everything, in fact), and it's a mark of Bryson's skill that he is able to carve a clear path through the thickets of theory and controversy that infest all these disciplines, all the while maintaining a cracking pace and a fairly judicious tone without obvious longueurs or signs of haste. Even readers fairly familiar with some or all of these areas of discourse are likely to learn from
A Short History. If not, they will at least be amused--the tone throughout is agreeable, mingling genuine awe with a mild facetiousness that often rises to wit.
One compelling theme that appears again and again is the utter unpredictability of the universe, despite all that we think we know about it. Nervous page-turners may care to omit the sensational chapters on the possible ways in which it all might end in disaster--Bryson enumerates with cheerful relish the kind of event that makes you want to climb under the bedclothes: undetectable asteroid colliding with the earth; superheated magma chamber erupting in your back garden; ebola carrier getting off a plane in London or New York; the HIV virus mutating to prevent its destruction in the mosquito's digestive system. Indeed, the chief theme of this sprightly book is the miraculous unlikeliness, in a universe ruled by randomness, of stability and equilibrium--of which one result is ourselves and the complex, fragile planet we inhabit. --
Robin Davidson
Amazon.com:From primordial nothingness to this very moment,
A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Though
A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "Life Itself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of
Life and
Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights--Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould--that he finds literary gold.
--Therese Littleton
Durchschnittliche Bewertung:
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The book could be good for children at a certain age, but some stuff would be above their head. On the other hand a lot of pages are boring for the aducated adult ... I read it anyway as some kind of general refreshing course. At least it's written in a nice styleand contains lots of funny short stories ... My major complaint is the totally nationalistic representation of the history of science. After reading the book one might think that 85% of all scientific breakthroughs were made by commonwealth counties - mainly GB, US & Australia ... really, that's offensive :-( :-(. Try to get out of your cage please !
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This book covers numerous stunning facts and interesting stories about the world as we see it today. Beware that this is not a scientific textbook, so don't expect to become a physicist by reading it. People with moderate background knowledge in natural sciences might deem this book boring. If you do have a profound scientific background of physics, however, this book will provide you some interesting stories you probably never have heard of in university lectures.
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I've read all of Bill Bryson's books, I believe, and this is one of his best. He takes the reader back to his boyhood home in Iowa, located in the Central U.S. for some very funny, and very touching! moments with his father. If you've ever had a strained relationship with Dad you will be able to connect with the material presented here.
Bryson is famous for being a wonderful travel writer, penning books about his journeys across the world and the U.S. That stuff is all very funny, providing lots of laughs. But this new book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" goes a step beyond that; it's not merely humorous, it's also tender. And deep. and heartfelt. Emotions I've never felt before when reading Bryson.
I'd rank this as one of the three funniest books of the year thus far. I also enjoyed "Dave Barry's Money Secrets" and Martha Bolton's "Maybe Life's Just Not That Into You" the latter a hilarious send up of self improvement books, and my personal pick for ...
weiter
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Ich habe mich 250 Seiten lang geärgert und es dann sein lassen, schade. Zwei Hauptkritikpunkte:
1. Völlig angloamerikanische Einseitigkeit. Natürlich kann man darüber streiten, wer der wichtigste Forscher in diesem oder in jenem Bereich war, ein Buch aber über alle Fragen dieser Welt zu schreiben und dabei Humboldt oder Gauss aussen vor zu lassen, oder Volta, Marconi, Focault, Gagarin ... das ist schon stark.
2. Es fehlt eine klare Struktur, ein klarer roter Faden. Seitenweise werden für sich betrachtet sicher interessante Beobachtungen beschrieben, die sich auf Dauer aber eher zusammenhanglos und belanglos aneinanderreihen. Hier wäre es wohl für den Leser angenehmer gewesen, überflüssige Details wir Orts-, Instituts- oder Assistentennamen einfach wegzulassen und damit ein lesbareres und kürzeres Buch zu schreiben.
Mein Rat: Wer sich für Astrophysik interessiert, der lese ein populärwissenschaftliches Buch hierzu, wer sich für Paläontologie interessiert, ...
weiter
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anschaulich und so spannend beschreiben, dass das Lesen nachwirkt. Es ist schwer, das Buch aus der Hand zu legen, bevor ein Kapitel beendet ist. Das genialste sind Bill Brysons Vergleiche. Es kann sein, dass etliche davon schon vorher veröffentlicht wurden, aber sicher nie in so amüsantem Kontext. Man zittert mit Aminosäuren, ob sie den Sprung zum "leben" schaffen, man wundert sich, dass noch kein Asteroid richtig voll getroffen hat, man fühlt mit den frustrierenden Erlebnissen früher Entdecker und Forscher: Kurz, es ist ein faszinierendes Erlebnis und mehr als Lesen. Sehr, sehr empfehlenswert, auch als GEschenk für Menschen, die heimlich "Wer wird Millionär" gucken und denken, sie lernen dabei etwas dazu... Wer die Geschichte/n gelesen hat, weiß vielleicht nicht wirklich mehr Abrufbares, aber hat definitiv ein großes Verstehen von Zusammenhängen--Ich empfehle-Giorgio Kostantinos-The Quest--
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