Great popular science book about the natural history.
Bill Bryson brings to light topics that seem incredibly boring or even inaccessible to an ordinary person. Fortunately, thanks to the accessible language and narrative style, reading on topics related to quantum physics, geology, paleontology, and molecular chemistry flows very smoothly.
Considering how many fields and topics are covered in this book, it is relatively short. The text contains a huge number of names and references to other publications and books. For those more interested in a specific topic, this is a great starting point for further exploration of these fields. Reading this book, we get not only a lot of hard data and descriptions of epochal scientific discoveries.
What makes this book unique is also the many biographies of scientists, interesting facts, stories and anecdotes that shed light on how people used to do science. We will also learn how trends in mainstream science changed, how hard it was to push through new theses and discoveries and how methods of discovering the secrets of the world developed. Each chapter has its “heroes” - explorers and scientists involved in a given field. The author tried not only to introduce famous scientists but also to present their motivations or anecdotes from their life. Thanks to this, we will get to know the biographies of such famous people as Einstein, Linnaeus, Mendel or Newton (and many others).
As I wrote earlier - this is a great book to start further exploration of individual topics related to science. In a very attractive way, we will recall the knowledge acquired at school and expand it with additional facts. This is a book that I will definitely return to, it is the type of literature that is worth reminding ourselves of.