Science stories

It strikes me as particularly wonderful fun to be a writer with a solid enough reputation for a publisher to enable him to travel the world interviewing scientists and visiting museums and parks of interest over the course of several years, as Bill Bryson must have been when he set off to write A Short History of Nearly Everything (2006). It doesn't seem to have been based on any particular aptitude or knowledge of the field, either. By his own proud account, Bryson knew almost nothing at all about any field of science, let alone all of them, before he started this book about nearly all of what he thought was most interesting of the history of science in a few different fields: astronomy, geology, chemistry and biology, mostly. 

It's a bit of a traveling freak show approach to scientific exposition: come see the amazing, the horrifying, the terrifying 'world of science' shack. This way has its pluses. I was greatly disturbed but also titillated to read about ancient eight-foot-long millipedes, raccoons the sizes of cars and rhinoceroses the size of suburban mansions. Apparently, were so big because in the days when mammals were just beginning their reign of the earth, our atmosphere was more highly oxygenated than it is now, and more oxygen means things grow bigger). I especially like -- in a frightened sort of way -- thinking about these raccoons etc because it lends a new aura of plausibility to some fantasy movie animals (I won't get into the specific television show that I had in mind; my excessive consumption of bad tv can wait for another day). Bryson also spends a lot of time informing the uninformed of all the many ways in which we might (all) die, and the many ways in which the universe is a more disquieting if not more downright terrifying surrounding than we'd imagined. This makes the book quite fun. But there's a lot of it that is silly: as an intro to cellular activity, Bryson takes you into the cell only to tell you that it is a "nightmareish" place because things move around so fast that if a human being were shrunk and put inside the cell, it would get pushed around a lot. Is that really relevant to anything?

Bryson declares very happily in the introduction that five or six years before the publication of this book, he knew almost nothing about the physical sciences: "I didn't know what a proton was, or a protein, didn't know a quark from a quasar..." and so on, which he seems to think is actually a reason for him to be the writer of this book. Indeed, his profession of ignorance is reproduced, in large letters, on the back of the book. But why should knowing nothing make you the person for the job? He seems to imply that it's because the books by scientists that he encountered when he was a kid were boring, though he does acknowledge that once he started looking into it, he found several wonderful popularizers of science already out there. Bryson doesn't inspire confidence as a purveyor of information. How can a man who knew nothing two years earlier suddenly have become an expert on what he describes as "nearly everything"?

One habit in particular that I find annoying is how complacent he is about current scientific facts. He has a very enjoyable way of showing how stupid and mistaken about nearly everything scientists of various orders were in the past, and he'll tell you when something is still "unknown", but if the scientists say it's so, then Bryson is glad to agree with them. So, you get a frequent recurrence of phrases such as "we now know." It feels very strange to hear someone talking expansively about all the absolutely ridiculous false consensuses scientists arrived at in the past, before reverting to a happy, facile view of "the facts." In addition to the "we now knows"s, there are quite a number of "it will be some time before we understand"s. It would have been helpful to this book if Bryson had read some Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos, along with his geneticists and geologists, to stop some of his delusions about the onward march of science.

Am I just harping on the lack of rigorousness for something that was never meant to be rigorous? But some of it really annoys me. Bryson at some point calls Stephen Jay Gould "ever scrupulous" as though this were an insult -- something to the effect of, one whose over-cautiousness leads to the dashing of cute but apocryphal anecdotes.

And even though it is impressive that he managed, in so short a time, to get enough of an understanding of such a variety of subjects as to be able to write about them, every so often he makes statements that, to be blunt, seem idiotic. For example:

The nineteenth century was already a chilly time. For two hundred years Europe and North America in particular had experienced a Little Ice Age, as it has become known, which permitted all kinds of wintry events -- frost fairs on the Thames, ice-skating races along Dutch canals -- that are mostly impossible now. It was a period, in other words, when frigidity was much on people's minds. So we may perhaps excuse nineteenth-century geologists for being slow to realize that the world they lived in was in fact balmy compared with former epochs, and that much of the land around them had been shaped by crushing glaciers and cold that would wreck even a frost fair.

Why, Bill, would the fact of the temperature being colder than it would be a hundred years later make it harder for someone to imagine that at some point in the past, things had been colder still? I could as easily imagine a journalist a hundred years from now hypothesizing that because the 20th century was comparatively cold, it was easy for scientists to imagine ancient Ice Ages. It's a bit of a throwaway and it isn't central to his explanations, but it and its many brothers in this book irk me.

Bryson's cutesy style is sometimes enjoyable: I liked the description of my head as "one big oil bon-bon" for the thousands of mites living in my pillow. And he finds useful ways of describing things such as the fact that for the average pillow, which is apparently six years old (if this is a nation- or culture-specific average, it is not told to us), about one-tenth of its weight is from dead skin, mites living and dead, and mite dung. But when I say finds I mean finds, not creates -- this was someone else's example first. And despite my many irritations, it is a pleasant, if superficial, read about a bunch of different branches of science.