Who is Bill Bryson?
Bill Bryson (William McGuire Bryson) is an American-British author of books on travel, the English language, travel and other non-fiction topics.
Chapter 1:
I started reading this book yesterday A Short History of Nearly Everything, which goes over the history of the crazy beginnings of how the universe was quite literally created. There have been several changes to scientific knowledge over the years since the book has been written to date the book has still not been updated. The book gives Pluto planet status, but in 2006 was classified as a dwarf planet, and Bryson also talks about the Higgs Boson but only as a theory or speculations, but in 2012 it was confirmed that it was real.
The first chapter goes over the universe and how it was created, from its humble beginnings. He talks about protons and how immensely small they are, the big bang and how it was confirmed that it happened, how if gravity was 0.01 stronger we would be crushed if it was 0.01 weaker the universe would expand until everything would be so far apart that nothing could happen. He goes over some pretty interesting things like how the “edge of the universe” was found and its a pretty crazy story, which in summary is two scientists that discovered the cosmic background accidentally while trying to run a test which earned them a nobel peace prize. Overall the first chapter goes over a lot of pretty interesting information that gets your brain thinking.