Bill Bryson
David Levene/Eyevine
Rowan Hooper: Bill, when I mentioned in the office that you came people reacted as if I had said that Ryan Gosling or David Beckham had visited me.
Bill Bryson: This is my appearance.
RH: Your book is from 2003. A Brief History of Almost Everythinghas become one of the best-selling non-fiction books of the 21st century. And now you've fixed it.
He was over 20 years old. And, obviously, science has advanced a lot. Take Denisovan. When I wrote the book, no one had the slightest idea about these archaic peoples. Same with Man of Floreshobbit So I thought I'd update this. It was a real pleasure for me because I got to go back and re-interview a lot of the people I talked to the first time.
RH: That's one of the joys of being a science reporter, isn't it? The time that scientists give you is a privilege to receive the time of world experts.
I think that among many scientists, no one has ever shown much interest in what they do. And the more technical the work, the less likely it is that people in the pub will say, “Oh, tell me more.” But then I say, “This is amazing. Tell me all about it.”
And the question I always ask them is: how did you get started in this field, what was the magical moment that made you want to dedicate your life to studying lichens or whatever?
RH: Let me ask you this question: what was the magic moment for you and science?
I was terrible at science in school. I'm bored out of my mind. When I was a kid growing up in America in the 50s and 60s, there was a tendency that when you were taught physics, it was to make you a physicist, and if they taught you chemistry, it was like they were trying to create new generations of chemists.
And there are a lot of people like me who will never become scientists but should be able to do science at some level. Obviously, science explains everything there is to know. It tells us who we are, where we are going and what we need to do if we want to get there. I thought there had to be some level where I could engage with science and admire the wonder of it without having to go through a lot of equations and things like that, something like a whiteboard.
And I told my publishers about it, and they all said, “No, this is a really stupid idea, you're not competent, you just shouldn't be doing this. Leave it to Stephen Hawking.” But they let me do it.
And fortunately, it turns out that there are many people like me in the world who want to know about science. The whole idea of the book was: How do we know what we know? How do scientists figure these things out?
One of the things I didn't expect was that the amount of things we don't know is actually fascinating. It would be terrible if we knew everything.
You know, we could do a lot just by knowing the fact that we don't know how many species of insects there are on Earth.
RH: They're going extinct before we even know how many there are. This brings me to the issue of climate change, which is not in the book, and I'm wondering why you chose not to mention it?
Yes, it was a difficult challenge, but the idea of the book is really to try to understand how we got to where we are now, to our current state of knowledge, as best I can understand it. So, there is a lot in the book about the history of science.
Penny Sarchet: One thing that has changed between the original and the new version is that in 2003 the long human life span was about 650,000 hours, or 74.2 years, and now it is 700,000 hours, 80-plus years. This is a significant increase in life expectancy during this time.
Originally I wanted to say that we only live 650,000 hours. If you think about the number of hours of your life that you have wasted doing idle things, just watching Coronation Street.
PS: Was there anything in particular when you were editing the book that was unexpectedly exciting?
I was shocked to discover that there are twice as many known moons in the solar system. I thought, “How hard is it to identify the moon? Where have they all been?”
“
One of the things I didn't expect was that the amount of things we don't know is actually fascinating.
“
Quantity moons of Jupiter tripled in 20 years. Of course, many of these satellites are very small. And apparently the definition of a moon is something rocky orbiting a planet.
RH: Another thing that's very different is the proliferation of the human family tree – it's more like a hedge! Did this surprise you? This was starting to look pretty simple, wasn't it?
Yes, it was. Not only for me, but also for people in this field. They were quite sure that they understood something. And then the Denisovans, also hobbits of Flores. And other archaic groups of people that have been found since then.
As a complete outsider, I am struck by the question: how did all these people move? I mean, how did they break up and what happened when they ran into each other? There is a tendency to think that there would be fighting, but in fact there was a lot of interbreeding. I think it's touching to think that these people lived side by side for a long time. Because we are modern wise man don't do it very well at all.
Alec Luhn: Twenty years ago the atmosphere was more conducive. Now in the US people are talking about war on science. Was it difficult to create a 2.0 version of your book in the world we live in?
The whole idea of the book is that, since [the first one has] I was there for 20 years and I hope to be there for another 20 years. And I hope that under the current US administration, we will look back on this in a few years and see this as some kind of blip.
It would be simply tragic if this kind of politics, this kind of vindictiveness and institutionalized anger became a permanent feature of the United States.
This is an edited version interview broadcast on the New Scientist podcast The world, the universe and us
Topics:
