A Short History of Nearly Everything

The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: “I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.” “Don’t you think God knows the facts?” Bethe asked. “Yes,” said Szilard. “He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.”

So begins a book that I stumbled upon yesterday, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I’m only on page 23 or so, but it’s a remarkable book that explains in (as) plain (as possible) English some of the answers to life’s biggest questions about how the universe was formed, what we know about the solar system, how civilizations came to be — I’m not doing the thing justice with my description, but in the first few pages it’s funny and it’s interesting and I’m looking forward to getting to the rest of it.

While Bryson lays out current knowledge about the Big Bang and the nature of the universe — the how of everything — he’s so far leaving the who out of it, and that’s fine with me. The who is a matter of faith that no scientific method can ever prove, which is the most amazing fact of all.