{"product_id":"a-short-history-of-nearly-everything-isbn-9780767908184","title":"A Short History of Nearly Everything","description":"\u003cb\u003eTHE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • One of the world’s most beloved writers and \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eA Walk in the Woods\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Body\u003c\/i\u003e takes his ultimate journey—into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brims with strange and amazing facts . . . destined to become a modern classic of science writing.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eA Walk in the Woods\u003c\/i\u003e, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail—well, most of it. In \u003ci\u003eA Sunburned Country\u003c\/i\u003e, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Short History of Nearly Everything\u003c\/i\u003e is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.“Stylish [and] stunningly accurate prose. We learn what the material world is like from the smallest quark to the largest galaxy and at all the levels in between . . . brims with strange and amazing facts . . . destined to become a modern classic of science writing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Bryson has made a career writing hilarious travelogues, and in many ways his latest is more of the same, except that this time Bryson hikes through the world of science.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Bryson is surprisingly precise, brilliantly eccentric and nicely eloquent . . . a gifted storyteller has dared to retell the world’s biggest story.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSeattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hefty, highly researched and eminently readable.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Simon Winchester, \u003ci\u003eThe Globe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“All non-scientists (and probably many specialized scientists, too) can learn a great deal from his lucid and amiable explanations.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eNational Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Bryson is a terrific stylist. You can’ t help but enjoy his writing, for its cheer and buoyancy, and for the frequent demonstration of his peculiar, engaging turn of mind.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eOttawa Citizen\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Wonderfully readable. It is, in the best sense, learned.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eWinnipeg Free Press\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eBill Bryson\u003c\/b\u003e’s bestselling books include \u003ci\u003eThe Road to Little Dribbling, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, One Summer, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid\u003c\/i\u003e. His acclaimed work of popular science \u003ci\u003eA Short History of Nearly Everything\u003c\/i\u003e won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize and is the bestselling nonfiction book of the twenty-first century. Bill Bryson was a chancellor of Durham University, is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society, and lives in England.\u003cb\u003e1 \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHOW TO BUILD A UNIVERSE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp   just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial   thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold   something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of   seconds contained in half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic,   to say the very least.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Now imagine if you can (and of course you can't) shrinking   one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small   that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about   an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I'm assuming of   course that you wish to build an inflationary universe. If you'd prefer instead to   build a more old-fashioned, standard Big Bang universe, you'll need additional materials.   In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is—every last mote and particle   of matter between here and the edge of creation—and squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally   compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a singularity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In either   case, get ready for a really big bang. Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe   place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because   outside the singularity there is no where. When the universe begins to expand, it   won't be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is   the space it creates as it goes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity   as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space,   no darkness. The singularity has no \"around\" around it. There is no space for it   to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there—whether   it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there   forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past   for it to emerge from.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And so, from nothing, our universe begins.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In a single blinding   pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the   singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively   second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer   wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than   a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is   a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions   that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about   one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the   matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place   of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all   done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When this moment happened is   a matter of some debate. Cosmologists have long argued over whether the moment of   creation was 10 billion years ago or twice that or something in between. The consensus   seems to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years, but these things are   notoriously difficult to measure, as we shall see further on. All that can really   be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons   unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There   is of course a great deal we don't know, and much of what we think we know we haven't   known, or thought we've known, for long. Even the notion of the Big Bang is quite   a recent one. The idea had been kicking around since the 1920s, when Georges Lem   tre, a Belgian priest-scholar, first tentatively proposed it, but it didn't really   become an active notion in cosmology until the mid-1960s when two young radio astronomers   made an extraordinary and inadvertent discovery.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Their names were Arno Penzias and   Robert Wilson. In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communications antenna   owned by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a persistent   background noise—a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible.   The noise was unrelenting and unfocused. It came from every point in the sky, day   and night, through every season. For a year the young astronomers did everything   they could think of to track down and eliminate the noise. They tested every electrical   system. They rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, wiggled wires, dusted plugs.   They climbed into the dish and placed duct tape over every seam and rivet. They climbed   back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean   of what they referred to in a later paper as \"white dielectric material,\" or what   is known more commonly as bird shit. Nothing they tried worked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Unknown to them,   just thirty miles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by Robert   Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to   get rid of. The Princeton researchers were pursuing an idea that had been suggested   in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow that if you looked deep   enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from   the Big Bang. Gamow calculated that by the time it crossed the vastness of the cosmos,   the radiation would reach Earth in the form of microwaves. In a more recent paper   he had even suggested an instrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna at Holmdel.   Unfortunately, neither Penzias and Wilson, nor any of the Princeton team, had read   Gamow's paper.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was, of course, the   noise that Gamow had postulated. They had found the edge of the universe, or at least   the visible part of it, 90 billion trillion miles away. They were \"seeing\" the first   photons—the most ancient light in the universe—though time and distance had converted   them to microwaves, just as Gamow had predicted. In his book \u003ci\u003eThe Inflationary Universe,\u003c\/i\u003e Alan Guth provides an analogy that helps to put this finding in perspective. If you   think of peering into the depths of the universe as like looking down from the hundredth   floor of the Empire State Building (with the hundredth floor representing now and   street level representing the moment of the Big Bang), at the time of Wilson and   Penzias's discovery the most distant galaxies anyone had ever detected were on about   the sixtieth floor, and the most distant things—quasars—were on about the twentieth.   Penzias and Wilson's finding pushed our acquaintance with the visible universe to   within half an inch of the sidewalk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Still unaware of what caused the noise, Wilson   and Penzias phoned Dicke at Princeton and described their problem to him in the hope   that he might suggest a solution. Dicke realized at once what the two young men had   found. \"Well, boys, we've just been scooped,\" he told his colleagues as he hung up   the phone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Soon afterward the \u003ci\u003eAstrophysical Journal\u003c\/i\u003e published two articles: one   by Penzias and Wilson describing their experience with the hiss, the other by Dicke's   team explaining its nature. Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for   cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they had found it, and   hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978   Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to   Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether   understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the   \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something   we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive,   and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient   remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember   that you can always watch the birth of the universe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Although everyone calls it   the Big Bang, many books caution us not to think of it as an explosion in the conventional   sense. It was, rather, a vast, sudden expansion on a whopping scale. So what caused   it?The National Bestseller by the Author of A Walk in the Woods","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300814344421,"sku":"NP9780767908184","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780767908184.jpg?v=1767720782","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything-isbn-9780767908184","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}