A Short History of Nearly Everything

Here, Bill Bryson reflects on the miracle of life, the fact that “trillions of drifting atoms had to somehow assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you” (1). He explains how atoms are mindless particles, and yet they work together to comprise each person on the planet. This is an incredibly unique phenomenon because, so far as we know, the atoms that “so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere” (2).

He describes life as mysteriously mundane because the basic building blocks of life such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and sulfur, are very elementary elements that can be found at a drugstore. And yet, somehow, they work together to make complex human beings. In fact, atoms comprise everything in the known universe. Before atoms, there was a vast nothingness.

He explains that life on Earth is “a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.9 percent—are no longer around” (3). And yet, here we are, able to think and reason and contemplate our existence. He briefly chronicles evolution, our journey from a “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” to a sentient human being (3).