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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Short History of Nearly Everything, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Discovery, and Mystery
Writing, Wonder, and Inspiration
Progress, Sexism, and Dogma
Existence, Awe, and Survival
Summary
Analysis
Astronomers can detect all sorts of cosmic events and objects—they can even detect distant radiation that’s so faint it has less energy than a snowflake does when it hits the ground. It’s funny, then, that nobody realized Pluto has a moon until James Christy discovered it in 1978. This is partly because professional telescopes don’t scan the sky (they’re set up to look at fixed parts of the universe and are costly to reposition) and also because both Pluto and Pluto’s moon like fuzzy specs of lint through a telescope. Before then, astronomers thought that the moon and the planet were one speck instead of two.
Bryson emphasizes that scientific discovery has come a long way. Humans have acquired the capacity to comprehend some of the finest details about our universe (such as minute variations in distant radiations). Nonetheless, there are many things we don’t know much about at all, such as Pluto’s moon. Often, limitations in our knowledge happen because of the limits of technology, meaning it takes both good data and a bright mind to piece together a scientific claim.
Themes
Astronomer Percival Lowell first postulates Pluto’s existence (though he also thinks Mars’s canals were built by ancient Martians and that Pluto was a gas giant). A young amateur named Clyde Tombaugh finally finds Pluto—it’s a strange planet because nobody knows what it’s made of, and its orbit isn’t on the same plane as the other planets in our solar system (it’s like a tilted hat). Technically, there are many Pluto-like objects in that part of space—some no larger than a lump of coal. Scientists have discovered over 600 of these objects since 2002, when curiosity about objects in that region—which is four billion miles away—increased.
Bryson wants to dispel the idea that humans know a lot about the universe by showing that even the closest cosmic objects continue to evade us: we haven’t yet figured out the objects in our own solar system, let alone the universe at large. Bryson also emphasizes our lack of knowledge about the universe by showing how many false hypotheses—say, Lowell’s postulation about Martians—that scientists conjure up. Finally, Bryson shows that often, the scientific pursuit is helped by curious amateurs like Tombaugh. This means that the more curious people there are, the more scientific discoveries are made, which is why it’s so important for science writing to be engaging and accessible—it fuels human curiosity that leads to scientific knowledge.
Themes
It’s hard to imagine how far away four billion miles is. Light can get there in seven hours, but it took the Voyager spacecrafts over a decade (and only because Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune lined up in the right way, which happens every 175 years). If Bryson were to map the distance and he made Earth the size of a pea, Jupiter would be a thousand feet away, while Pluto would be 1.5 miles away and would be the size of a “bacterium.” From Pluto, the sun looks like a pinhead, just a bright star among others in the sky.
Bryson emphasizes the vast scale of the universe by helping the reader imagine a scale model of the solar system. Realizing how far away Earth is from other planets and objects drive home just shrouded in mystery our universe is and how much ground scientists need to cover. The scientific endeavor, thus, has a long way to go. Bryson’s scale model also helps emphasize how lucky it is that one planet in this enormous solar system sustains life, since in all this vastness we haven’t discovered any planets besides Earth that are hospitable to life.
Themes
Astronomers also keep discovering new objects, meaning we still don’t know what’s in our own solar system, which stretches to the Oort comet cloud that’s 10,000 miles beyond Pluto on Bryson’s scaled map. The Oort cloud is a peaceful cluster of comets marking the outer edge of the solar system. Sometimes, a comet gets nudged out of orbit and flies inward toward a potential collision with the planets, or it flies outward into the desolation of space. It would take 25,000 years for an Oort cloud comet that’s nudged out of orbit to reach the next star.
Once again, Bryson emphasizes how vast space is to instill a sense of awe in the reader and to prompt a feeling of appreciation that in all this vastness, there happens to be one tiny spot where life can thrive: Earth. With this in mind, Bryson aim to convey how lucky humans are to be here.
Themes
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The average distance between stars is 20 million million miles. It’s hard to imagine aliens coming from so far away just to make crop circles on Earth, but it’s not improbable that they exist. Scientists think that there are 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way and 140 billion other galaxies. A scientist named Frank Drake calculates that there are likely millions of other advanced civilizations in the cosmos. However, the nearest one would be over 200 light years away, meaning if they were looking at Earth right now, they’d see the French Revolution and people in powdered wigs.
Bryson expands the incomprehensibly large scale of the universe: the sheer magnitude of space makes it difficult to pin down much scientific knowledge at all. This is especially true when not only distance, but time, is warped by space’s vastness. Just as faraway aliens wouldn’t see us as we are now, being light years away from other objects means we aren’t able to see more than an image of the past when we seek to learn about space.
Themes
