An overwhelming amount of knowledge, but dished out in a humorous and entertaining manner to be enjoyable. He is overly concerned with giving the rightly due credit to scientists who are unknown outside of their own fields, but this is understandable.It's shocking and depressing to know that people have and are still killing off species at an alarming rate. The immensity of the universe and the smallness of us is difficult to grasp.
The planet is such a fragile system of balances, if one things goes wrong, our existence will be over. Many species have come and gone on this planet before us. From meteors to volcanoes, earthquakes, virus's, sun flares, the earth's biosphere, global warming... the disasters that could extinguish life on earth are staggering. It's amazing we've made it to this point.
I think the most interesting and surprising part of the book is wrapping my head around the idea that all molecules are made of energy and not a solid object, and that everything only appears hard or impenetrable because of the closeness of it's atoms. Everything is made of energy, including us, we and every object around us are composed of protons and electrons which are fuzzy elements of electricity. B-b-b-b-bbb. Triangulating the distance to the moon was also a brilliant realization as well, I must have missed, been asleep or completely forgotten this concept in school.
I read Stephen Hawlking's A Brief History of Time, but was put off by too many computations. Bryson skims over many facets of science and makes it palatable to a general audience. A great book for people that want to learn more but not be board to sleep.
4 ½ out of 5
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