Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

For my birthday, my sister got me one of the awesomest books I've read in the past few years: A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. It'd been on my wishlist for quite a while now thanks to the folks at Ars and now it's finally mine :D

If you've ever been even remotely interested in physics, astronomy, chemistry, the earth, the human race or our weird scientists, then this is the book for you! Bill takes a lighthearted look at how -everything- came into existance. How did the universe form? What -is- the universe? What is gravity? How does it work? Why does it work? And the best part is that all of this is done in a rather humorous fashion. Bill not only focuses on the science itself, but also on the scientists themselves who can be -really- odd at times.

Aside from reading the book for the entertainment value I actually learn a lot as well. For example, there's the fact that atoms and such really aren't solid objects and that thus solidity itself (of objects) is merely an illusion. To quote the book:

When two objects come together in the real world - billiard balls are most often used for illustration - they don't actually strike each other. 'Rather,' as Timothy Ferris explains, 'the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other ... [W]ere it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.' when you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

Posted in: a short history of nearly everything , astronomy , bill bryson , physics , quantum mechanics