Bill Bryson on why he has updated A Short History of Nearly Everything
With the human family tree now more like a hedge and twice as many known moons, Bill Bryson talks to the New Scientist podcast about refreshing his 2003 bestselling book on science
Bill Bryson
David Levene/eyevine
**Rowan Hooper: Bill, when I mentioned in the office that you were coming in, people reacted like I’d said Ryan Gosling or David Beckham was visiting.
**Bill Bryson: It’s my looks.
**RH: Your 2003 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, became one of the best-selling non-fiction books of the 21st century. And now you’ve revised it.
**It was over 20 years old. And, obviously, science has moved on a great deal. Take the Denisovans. When I wrote the book, nobody had a clue about these archaic peoples. Same with Homo floresiensis, the hobbit. So I thought I’d bring it up to date. It became a real pleasure for me because I got to go back and reinterview a lot of the people that I spoke to first time around.
Penguin
**RH: It’s one of the joys of being a science reporter, isn’t it? The time that scientists give you, the privilege of getting the time of world experts.
**I think for a lot of scientists, nobody’s ever really expressed much interest in what they do. And the more technical the work, the less likely that people in a pub are gonna say: “Oh, tell me more.” But here am I saying: “This is amazing. Tell me all about it.”
And the question I always ask them was: what got you started in that field, what was the magic moment that made you want to spend your life studying lichens or whatever?
**RH: Let me turn that question on you: what was the magic moment for you and science?
**I was terrible at science at school. Bored out of my mind. There was a tendency when I was a kid growing up in America in the 50s and 60s that when they taught you physics, it was to make you into a physicist, or if they taught you chemistry, it was like they were trying to create new generations of chemists.
And there’s loads of people like me that are never going to be scientists, but ought to be able to engage with science at some level. Obviously, science explains everything there is to know. It tells us who we are, where we’re going and what we have to do if we want to get there. I thought there’s got to be some level at which I can engage with science and marvel at the wonder of it without having to go into lots of equations and all that sort of blackboard-type stuff.