http://www.chrisfordblog.com Just another blog Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:30:06 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 http://www.chrisfordblog.com/2009/01/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything/ http://www.chrisfordblog.com/2009/01/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything/#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:08:54 +0000 Chris http://www.chrisfordblog.com/2009/01/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything/ I love this book. A short history of nearly everything, isn’t really about everything but a history of science told in away that makes it really interesting to the reader. The author wrote this book because during a plane flight he looked down at the sea and wondered why the sea was salty and why he didn’t know the answer. 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.

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