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The incomparable Bill Bryson travels through time and space to introduce us to the world, the universe and everything in this groundbreaking bestseller.Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us.Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.
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Subjects
Science, Popular works, Ciencia, Obras populares, Science, popular works, Obras de divulgacio n., Natuurwetenschappen, Sciences, Ouvrages de vulgarisation, Wetenschapsbeoefening, Origin, Life, Humor, Travel, Philosophy, Culture, Nonfiction, Open Library Staff Picks, Human beings, popular science, Long Now Manual for Civilization, Reading Level-Grade 11, Reading Level-Grade 12, 30.01 history of the exact sciences, Einführung, Naturwissenschaften, Wetenschapsfilosofie, Natuurlijke historie, Einfu hrung, Large type books, Allgemeinwissen, Cosmology, Geology. Earth sciences, Science--popular works, Q162 .b88 2003, Q162 b916s 2003, 500, Science - general & miscellaneous, History & philosophy of science, Civilization - historyPlaces
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Une histoire de tout, ou presque ...
2011-05, Petite Biblio Payot
in French
2228906557 9782228906555
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A Short History of Nearly Everything by American author Bill Bryson is a popular science book that explains some areas of science, using easily accessible language that appeals more so to the general public than many other books dedicated to the subject. It was one of the bestselling popular science books of 2005 in the United Kingdom, selling over 300,000 copies.
A Short History deviates from Bryson's popular travel book genre, instead describing general sciences such as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics. In it, he explores time from the Big Bang to the discovery of quantum mechanics, via evolution and geology.
Bill Bryson wrote this book because he was dissatisfied with his scientific knowledge—that was, not much at all. He writes that science was a distant, unexplained subject at school. Textbooks and teachers alike did not ignite the passion for knowledge in him, mainly because they never delved in the whys, hows, and whens.
The ebook can be found elsewhere on the web at:
http://www.huzheng.org/bookstore/AShortHistoryofNearlyEverything.pdf
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- Created June 22, 2010
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December 18, 2021 | Edited by dcapillae | Merge works |
September 16, 2021 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
October 8, 2017 | Edited by MARC Bot | merge duplicate works of 'A short history of nearly everything' |
September 14, 2012 | Edited by VacuumBot | Updated format 'eBook' to 'E-book'; Removed author from Edition (author found in Work) |
June 22, 2010 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from marc_overdrive MARC record |