So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble insuch a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of anextraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly trickybusiness. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since thedawn of time, most-99.99 percent-are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not onlybrief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from aplanet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasnteasy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting ofother very ordinary elements-nothing you wouldnt find in any ordinary drugstore-and thatsall you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you.
And heres the thing. It wasnt exciting at all. It wasnt actually altogether comprehensible.
Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesnt, sofar as we can tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congeniallyflock together to form living thingson Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do itelsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane:
My own starting point, for what its worth, was an illustrated science book that I had as aclassroom text when I was in fourth or fifth grade. The book was a standard-issue 1950sschoolbookbattered, unloved, grimly hefty-but near the front it had an illustration that justcaptivated me: a cutaway diagram showing the Earths interior as it would look if you cut intothe planet with a large knife and carefully withdrew a wedge representing about a quarter ofits bulk.
Excited, I took the book home that night and opened it before dinner-an action that I expectprompted my mother to feel my forehead and ask if I was all right-and, starting with the firstpage, I read.
Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience atthe atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms dont actually care about you-indeed, dont even know that you are there. They dont even know that they are there. They aremindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notionthat if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce amound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once beenyou.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarchingimpulse: to keep you you.
So I decided that I would devote a portion of my life-three years, as it now turns out-toreading books and journals and finding saintly, patient experts prepared to answer a lot ofoutstandingly dumb questions. The idea was to see if it isnt possible to understand andappreciate-marvel at, enjoy even-the wonder and accomplishments of science at a level thatisnt too technical or demanding, but isnt entirely superficial either.
Whether or not atoms make life in other corners of the universe, they make plenty else;indeed, they make everything else. Without them there would be no water or air or rocks, nostars and planets, no distant gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things thatmake the universe so usefully material. Atoms are so numerous and necessary that we easilyoverlook that they neednt actually exist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fillitself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other physicalproperties on which our existence hinges. There neednt actually be a universe at all. For thelongest time there wasnt. There were no atoms and no universe for them to float about in.
I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid andthrilling prose-Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey, and Tim Flannery are three that jump out froma single station of the alphabet (and thats not even to mention the late but godlike RichardFeynman)-but sadly none of them wrote any textbook I ever used. All mine were written bymen (it was always men) who held the interesting notion that everything became clear whenexpressed as a formula and the amusingly deluded belief that the children of America wouldappreciate having chapters end with a section of questions they could mull over in their owntime. So I grew up convinced that science was supremely dull, but suspecting that it needntbe, and not really thinking about it at all if I could help it. This, too, became my position for along time.
That was my idea and my hope, and that is what the book that follows is intended to be.
But the author was strangely silent on such details-indeed, silent on everything butanticlines, synclines, axial faults, and the like. It was as if he wanted to keep the good stuffsecret by making all of it soberly unfathomable. As the years passed, I began to suspect thatthis was not altogether a private impulse. There seemed to be a mystifying universalconspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayedtoo near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a longdistance phone callfrom the frankly interesting.
Above all, it didnt answer any of the questions that the illustration stirred up in a normalinquiring mind: How did we end up with a Sun in the middle of our planet? And if it isburning away down there, why isnt the ground under our feet hot to the touch? And why isntthe rest of the interior melting-or is it? And when the core at last burns itself out, will some ofthe Earth slump into the void, leaving a giant sinkhole on the surface? And how do you knowthis? How did you figure it out?
Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoredevolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in yourpersonal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than theEarths mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has beenattractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fateand circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors wassquashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwisedeflected from its lifes quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the rightpartner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditarycombinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.
There was nothing-nothing at all anywhere.
Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modestmilestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atomswill shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And thats it for you.
To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemblein an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. Its an arrangement sospecialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. Forthe next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all thebillions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience thesupremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.
That is of course the miracle of life.
The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to bearound for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must beprepared to change everything about yourself-shape, size, color, species affiliation,everything-and to do so repeatedly. Thats much easier said than done, because the process ofchange is random. To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as the Gilbert andSullivan song put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traitsover and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at variousperiods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grownfins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek,been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse,and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and youmight now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore ordisgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for amouthful of delicious sandworms.
Then much later-about four or five years ago-I was on a long flight across the Pacific,staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certainuncomfortable forcefulness that I didnt know the first thing about the only planet I was evergoing to live on. I had no idea, for example, why the oceans were salty but the Great Lakeswerent. Didnt have the faintest idea. I didnt know if the oceans were growing more saltywith time or less, and whether ocean salinity levels was something I should be concernedabout or not. (I am very pleased to tell you that until the late 1970s scientists didnt know theanswers to these questions either. They just didnt talk about it very audibly.)And ocean salinity of course represented only the merest sliver of my ignorance. I didntknow what a proton was, or a protein, didnt know a quark from a quasar, didnt understandhow geologists could look at a layer of rock on a canyon wall and tell you how old it was,didnt know anything really. I became gripped by a quiet, unwonted urge to know a littleabout these matters and to understand how people figured them out. That to me remained thegreatest of all amazements-how scientists work things out. How does anybody know howmuch the Earth weighs or how old its rocks are or what really is way down there in thecenter? How can they know how and when the universe started and what it was like when itdid? How do they know what goes on inside an atom? And how, come to that-or perhapsabove all-can scientists so often seem to know nearly everything but then still cant predict anearthquake or even tell us whether we should take an umbrella with us to the races nextWednesday?
Anyway, we have a great deal of ground to cover and much less than 650,000 hours in whichto do it, so lets begin.
This is a book about how it happened-in particular how we went from there being nothing atall to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and alsosome of what happened in between and since. Thats a great deal to cover, of course, which iswhy the book is called A Short History of Nearly Everything, even though it isnt really. Itcouldnt be. But with luck by the time we finish it will feel as if it is.
Its hard to believe that there was ever a time when I had not seen such an illustrationbefore, but evidently I had not for I clearly remember being transfixed. I suspect, in honesty,my initial interest was based on a private image ofstreams of unsuspecting eastboundmotorists in the American plains states plunging over the edge of a sudden 4,000-mile-highcliff running between Central America and the North Pole, but gradually my attention did turnin a more scholarly manner to the scientific import of the drawing and the realization that theEarth consisted of discrete layers, ending in the center with a glowing sphere of iron andnickel, which was as hot as the surface of the Sun, according to the caption, and I rememberthinking with real wonder: "How do they know that?"I didnt doubt the correctness of the information for an instant-I still tend to trust thepronouncements of scientists in the way I trust those of surgeons, plumbers, and otherpossessors of arcane and privileged information-but I couldnt for the life of me conceive howany human mind could work out what spaces thousands of miles below us, that no eye hadever seen and no X ray could penetrate, could look like and be made of. To me that was just amiracle. That has been my position with science ever since.
The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting-fleeting indeed.
