Writing, Wonder, and Inspiration Theme Analysis

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, author Bill Bryson argues that scientists who are plagued with poor communication skills often fail to successfully engage people with their ideas, even if those ideas have profound scientific potential. Bryson finds that the wonder of scientific discovery is often masked by dull and technical writing, rendering it inaccessible to amateurs like himself. More importantly, valuable insights can be overlooked within the professional research community if they are poorly expressed, which slows down the process of scientific discovery. Bryson essentially claims that scientists need to express their ideas in engaging ways if they want their ideas to be impactful, meaning that the scientific endeavor to understand the world hinges as much on good expression as it does on good ideas.

Bryson argues that “dull” writing undermines the potential of science to fascinate people and inspire future scientists, which can have negative effects on scientific discovery overall. Citing his own prejudices about science, Bryson says that he grew up thinking science was “supremely dull” because many textbook writers underestimate the importance of making science engaging or “comprehensible” to the reader. Bryson recalls that it was as if the author of his classroom textbook “wanted to keep all the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable,” which left him in the dark about how “any human mind” could come up with scientific ideas in the first place. For Bryson, this is a wasted opportunity because instilling “wonder” and curiosity is an essential component of inspiring children to become scientists themselves one day. Bryson offers a counter-narrative in A Short History of Nearly Everything by nesting scientific ideas within intriguing stories about the people who come up with them. In doing so, he shows that science isn’t obtuse and inaccessible, but rather a fascinating human endeavor that anybody can pursue.

Bryson emphasizes that many obtuse phrases in textbooks—such as “anticlines, synclines, axial faults, and the like”—often originate from the insights of curious amateurs looking at the world around them. The personal diving adventures of early 20th-century deep sea divers Charles William Beebe and Otis Bartin, for example, provided early insights about “what[‘s] down there,” and their invention of diving equipment for their hobby helped oceanography take off as a formal discipline. Similarly, the fossil hunting craze that took hold of the public’s imagination in 19th-century England enabled many amateurs to discover some of the world’s most important dinosaur fossils. For instance, a doctor’s wife discovered the first fossilized dinosaur tooth in Sussex in 1822. Overall, Bryson aims to incite curiosity—which is what gets most scientific discovery off the ground—and dispel notions that science is only a boring matter for esoteric professionals. 

Bryson similarly targets cases within the professional community in which good scientific ideas fail to catch on because they are badly written, emphasizing how important it is for scientists to communicate in ways that engage and inspire others if they want their theories to gain traction in the scientific community. For example, Bryson discusses James Hutton, who “singlehandedly and quite brilliantly […] created the science of geology” in 1785, but failed to inspire anyone to take it up—despite writing a paper and three books on the subject—because his ideas were so poorly expressed. Bryson largely blames Hutton’s convoluted prose for his failure to inspire engagement in geological sciences. For example, when Hutton realized that heat within Earth creates rocks and mountain chains, his complicated wording at a conference included phrases such as: “after the body has been actuated by heat, it is by the reaction of the proper matter of the body, that the chasm which constitutes the vein is formed,” which left a confused audience without “the faintest idea what he was talking about.” Bryson says that Charles Lyell—the “greatest geologist of the following century,” who laid the groundwork for modern geological sciences in the 1800s—admitted “he couldn’t get through” Hutton’s books, which implies that if Hutton’s writing were more approachable, modern geological science might have included more of his ideas and would have therefore advanced much more rapidly. Bryson argues that it took almost 150 years for plate tectonics—which Hutton effectively captured in his ideas—to garner serious attention in geology, suggesting that had Hutton been able to inspire scientists with his ideas in his lifetime, over a century’s worth of scientific advances might have been gained.

Bryson thus shows that “dull” writing turns off amateurs and kills—rather than instills—curiosity. It even leads professional scientists to overlook good theories when they’re expressed in obtuse, convoluted prose. Ultimately, Bryson argues that bad writing and poorly-expressed ideas can dramatically limit scientific discovery, meaning that scientists should strive to write engagingly if they want their work to be impactful.