A Short History of Nearly Everything

What has propelled this popular science book to the New York Time's Best Seller List? The answer is simple. It is superbly written.

Author Bill Bryson is not a scientist - far from it. He is a professional writer, and hitherto researching his book was quite ignorant of science by his own admission. "I didn't know what a proton was, or a protein, didn't know a quark from a quasar, didn't understand how geologists could look at a layer of rock on a canyon wall and tell you how old it was, didn't know anything really," he tells us in the Introduction.

But Bryson got curious about these and many other things: "Suddenly, I had a powerful, uncharacteristic urge to know something about these matters and to understand how people figure them out."

All of us should be lucky to be so curious. Young children are. That's why they're called "little scientists." New to the world and without inhibitions, they relentlessly ask questions about it.

And Bill Bryson's curiosity led him to some good questions too: "How does anybody know how much the Earth weighs or how old its rocks are or what really is way down there in the center? How can they [scientists] know how and when the Universe started and what it was like when it did? How do they know what goes on inside an atom?" The Introduction also tells us that the greatest amazements for Bryson are how scientists worked out such things. His book is a direct result of addressing these issues.