Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

 Imagine going back to your last day of high school. For me, that's something like 9 years ago and eleven months. Imagine being able to remember everything that you were taught in science class in the eight years before that. You remember exactly how plate tectonics works and how the cosmic ladder works and why those animations about cells you see on the internet aren't all that accurate.

That is what reading A Short History of Nearly Everything feels like.

There are two big lessons you get from reading and relearning secondary school science. The first is very simple: this is how the universe works. 

The second is much more interesting, and much more fun to go over here than in something like Structure of Scientific Revolutions: who, how, and when are scientists doing the science? How do we know "this is how the universe works"?

Let's answer the "Who" quickly: rich, white men. The modern scientific edifice comes from rich, imperial nerds who jockeyed for status and prestige. Bryson walks us through the lifetimes of different scientists, and maybe 50% of them could be (or are) preambled with "This story is going to be really funny, but this guy was a major asshole."

The assholery is rampant and continuous. Scientists race each other to publish the same idea, they denigrate other schools of thought mercilessly, and they exile those with different theories, only to accept them a few decades later. All of these sins are amplified if you're not a man or you're not white. Modern science discourse, beset as it is by a cycle of grant chasing, tenure chasing and paper pushing, will sometimes try to harken back on this era as if it were any better. It wasn't, just bad in different ways.

A second thought: Science is born from the arts. The upper class intelligensia origins of modern scientific understanding happened because rich people had a lot of free time on their hand to go write papers about nature. The 18th and 19th century scientists weren't alone in their own bubble, separated from 18th and 19th poets and artists and political philosophers. They comingled. They drank together. They fucked. 

Science then, seems to have a same problem as the arts do: how do you deal with the work of art when the artist was a complete piece of shit? Science may have the advantage that it is true whether or not someone likes it, but Science, like Art, has to sell itself to us, and that means it has to appeal to us aesthetically. When the Artist does terrible things, like, say, triple down on trans exlcusionary radical feminism, that does make us feel a little blah about reading her boy wizard books. When the Scientist does terrible things, like, say, create a worldview that bans promulgates the idea of genetic policies, that may make us feel weird about concepts like the Standard Deviation.

But, in the latter case, it obviously shouldn't. The Standard Deviation is a pretty good measure for a bunch of things. It may have arose out of the mind that had a class, race, and national consciousness entirely alien to our own, but it stands its own ground. Art ought to be able to do the same thing. Once you cut out the Creators' own maliciousness, if the thing is still standing then it deserves its own respect.

This cutting process itself is important. Knowing about the errors made by past scientists, both ethical and social, allow us to understand how to prevent these errors from happening to/by us. Knowing about the errors of artists allows us to detect and mitigate these problems when we consume their work. Salavaging past art then, is exactly like salavaging past science: we have to learn how to filter out the bullshit. 

Fortunately, in a lot of ways, Science as an instution has improved by a lot. The competitiveness and backstabbing gave way to PBS Nova TV tropes about racing science teams. The sexism, while still a present danger, cannot stop women from discovering CRISPR and mRNA. Indeed, science can be done and is done by even the ideologically disabled. You don't need to be a rich white man. 

Most people need to read ASHONE, even 16 years after it was published, just to brush up on their science, but many also need to read it to understand how it got discovered- and how to mitigate the terribleness that can come out of those discoveries.