Arielle’s Sabbatical Syllabus

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A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

wow! i have officially finished the first book in my syllabus. i lost my notes from the first quarter of the book but that’s ok! life moves on.

really not much to say other than the title really does encapsulate the nature of this book. it served as a good intro to a lot of topics, namely astronomy, a LOT of geology, chemistry, genetics, evolution, some astrophysics, palaeontology, paleoanthropology… let’s just say it was quite dense but very easy to consume!

my biggest takeaways:

• basically everything we know now is pretty much a collection of knowledge from the last 500 years give or take lol. this feels a bit unreal to me bc… the earth has existed for billions of years and we’ve only just begun scratching the surface of what we do/do not know. i always had a mini premonition that humans have figured out a lot. this is not true at all. in fact, not only do we know close to nothing in relation to what is hypothetically out there, we probably are wrong about a lot of things we are confident in now. and that is just the way life rolls baby
• in the same essence, it feels kinda good to not know anything at all. dare i say we live in some of the most exciting times? it seems like learning & the distribution of knowledge grows exponentially from generation to generation. feeling quite lucky to be alive for this generation of instant telecom and air conditioning but im sure that 1000 years from now, my great^10 grandchildren will 1. not know me. 2. think i lived absolutely archaically.
• scientific contributions are driven primarily by: wars, spite, resource extraction & sometimes pure intellectual curiosity. but a lot more spite than one realizes
• we are just so lucky to be alive and conscious. how humans are alive is beyond me. i will not take this mf for granted!!!!!
• i can see why people don’t care about climate change (the earth has had major shifts between ice ages & extreme heat, blah blah) but that was over the course of hundreds of millions of years. not within a century. but there is so many geological processes re: carbon that are ripe to exploit to counter the mess we’ve made in recent years
• microorganisms are the backbone of much more than i realize
• science really was a rich person industry for a long time. in many ways it still is. we also hadn’t seen strides for women in stem until VERY recently. how sad!!
• i would like to visit yellowstone national park and i hope this mf does not erupt anytime soon
• posteriori conclusions is now one of my favourite terms - “any banal situation can seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful”

some questions i will begin to ask in my daily conversations:

• to experts in niche fields: what is one ‘truth’ we are lead to believe is accurate/factual that you think is potentially/totally wrong? [it turns out a lot of science is kinda hugely based off of small assumptions on small amts of evidence. how confident do we have to be in order to spread knowledge in mass amounts? how do we “take back” statements or do we just live better not knowing/questioning our beginning assumptions?]
• what do you think is the greatest unanswered question in our lifetime that we can solve? [a couple of potential answers: maybe cancer… maybe magnetic fields… maybe not… curious for other people’s thoughts!]
• what do you think is the greatest unanswered question of humanity, period?

overall, good basis to start off with but not too many strongly worded feelings. after all, this is simply a digestible recollection of facts and stories and it is wonderful that bryson actually flew to meet many of the researchers in their habitats. it most definitely answered my broad question of “how did we/i get here” in the most physical/scientific sense and i’d recommend reading it far more slower than i did (i read the latter 75% of the book in 3 days lol)

notable quotes:

random excerpts on people i enjoyed:

• Lyell believed that the Earth’s shifts were uniform and steady — that everything that had ever happened in the past could be explained by events still going on today.
• The German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, no intellectual slouch himself, wrote that Kelvin had by far the greatest “intelligence and lucidity, and mobility of thought” of any man he had ever met. “I felt quite wooden beside him sometimes,” he added, a bit dejectedly.
• Scheele’s one notable shortcoming was a curious insistence on tasting a little of everything he worked with, including such notoriously disagreeable substances as mercury, prussic acid (another of his discoveries), and hydrocyanic acid—a compound so famously poisonous that 150 years later Erwin Schrödinger chose it as his toxin of choice in a famous thought experiment.
• Madame Lavoisier had an incisive intellect and soon was working productively alongside her husband. Despite the demands of his job and busy social life, they managed to put in five hours of science on most days — two in the early morning and three in the evening — as well as the whole of Sunday, which they called their jour de bonheur (day of happiness).
• The work was delicate and exhausting, and had to be suspended for a time to permit Michelson a brief but comprehensive nervous breakdown
• ON RUTHERFORD: He wasn’t even particularly clever at experimentation. He was simply tenacious and open-minded. For brilliance he substituted shrewdness and a kind of daring. His mind, in the words of one biographer, “was always operating out towards the frontiers, as far as he could see, and that was a great deal further than most other men.” Confronted with an intractable problem, he was prepared to work at it harder and longer than most people and to be more receptive to unorthodox explanations.
• ON RUTHERFORD: When someone remarked to him that he seemed always to be at the crest of a wave, he responded, ”Well, after all, I made the wave, didn’’t I?” C. P. Snow recalled how once in a Cambridge tailor’s he overheard Rutherford remark: “Every day I grow in girth. And in mentality.”
• Haldane’s son Jack, known to posterity as J.B.S., was a remarkable prodigy who took an interest in his father’s work almost from infancy. At the age of three he was overheard demanding peevishly of his father, ”But is it oxyhaemoglobin or carboxyhaemoglobin?” Throughout his youth, the young Haldane helped his father with experiments. By the time he was a teenager, the two often tested gases and gas masks together, taking turns to see how long it took them to pass out.
• There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, “Oh fuck, not another phylum.”
• Frustrated, Mendel retired from investigating heritability and spent the rest of his life growing outstanding vegetables.

other excerpts that made me smile/laugh:

• Seldom—perhaps never—has science been driven forward more swiftly and successfully by animosity.
• Chemistry was, generally speaking, a science for businesspeople, for those who worked with coal and potash and dyes, and not gentlemen, who tended to be drawn to geology, natural history, and physics.
• There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of facilities required to do the searching.
• Incidentally, the first, much thinner edition of that atlas, produced in 1896, divided clouds into ten basic types, of which the plumpest and most cushiony-looking was number nine, cumulonimbus. That seems to have been the source of the expression “to be on cloud nine.”
• ”Well, one school of thought says it was actually cool then because the sun was much weaker.” (I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the “Chinese restaurant problem”—  because we had a dim sun.)
• A surprising number, like the ubiquitous intestinal spirochetes, have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with you.

appreciating life:

• It is only the brevity of lifetimes that keeps us from appreciating the changes.
• A rival possibility is that such knowledge may simply be beyond us. “So far, fortunately,” writes Weinberg in Dreams of a Final Theory, “we do not seem to be coming to the end of our intellectual resources.”
• Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare.
• It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours—arguably even stronger.
• We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.
• The extraordinary fact is that we don’’t know which is more likely, a future offering us eons of perishing frigidity or one giving us equal expanses of steamy heat. Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge.
• If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here — and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.