An Even Shorter History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

right although Lord man president Provost dr. Bryson sheriff's ladies and gentlemen it is my very great pleasure to welcome you all to guild hall this evening and to extend the city's very warm greetings to everyone here as we mark the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Royal Society the city is rightly proud of its links with the Royal Society and the and the support it provides to science in so many ways after all the Royal Society's origins are entwined with its links to Gresham College itself still going strong a strong partnership with the city and still making a major contribution to cultural scientific and commercial thought and the city and the Royal Society are both proud of the work and enduring legacy of two of our greatest sons Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke anyone who comes through the city or has any feeling for it will be struck by Ren's enduring impact through the architecture life and work of the city's churches let alone his greatest achievement at the Cathedral Hook himself was an officer of the city corporation the city's survey performing it is thought over half the surveys of the burnt out city after the Great Fire as well as serving as gresham professor of geometry Renan Hooke did much for London and much for science and the city is proud that we have recently restored their most prominent joint surviving project the monument itself a combination of memorial to an historical event and scientific laboratory and the city is just as proud of the support it now provides the nation the nation's scientist base the markets have a range of financial products supporting the needs of investors in research and development especially in the new crucial markets for green energy indeed the financial services industry and our scientific are closely connected many of the innovations in the financial services industry such as the introduction of sophisticated financial instruments have been the brainchild of mathematicians physicists and engineers and the city's livery companies who often quiet often unsung but nonetheless significant charitable work play a major role and many do a great deal to support our scientific and manufacturing base on which note you will have found a leaflet on your chairs this evening nearly a third of the city delivery companies 28:28 out of the 108 are involved in promoting science and to celebrate the Society of three hundred and fiftieth anniversary they have come together to produce this summary of the very important work and support that they give to science clearly as Lord Mayor my role is to promote our world-class financial services industry when I know as well that the UK remains a world leader in developing new cutting-edge high value-added discoveries inventions and applications all essential precursors of advanced knowledge-based industries and delivery has and will continue to do much - through its support for science in education and research so I invite you to engage with them to support the next 350 years of British scientific success and anybody that has reached its three hundred and fiftieth birthday deserves our heartiest congratulations and the anniversary year has been a year of great achievements the Royal Society's current programme of work work is an inspiring one it has raised over 100 million pounds to support its work in grant-making science policy and education it has organized a fantastic range of events and activities to mark its anniversary especially its local heroes and capital science campaigns engaging the support and enthusiasm of 150 institutions across the country it has been an excellent year to mark a wonderful history and a wonderful future as well so my very heart is congratulations to everyone who has contributed in whatever way and especially to the fellows of the Royal Society a good number of which are here tonight thank you very much ladies and gentlemen Sheriff chief combina my Lords ladies and gentlemen as you have seen the Lord mayor has unavoidably to leave us but may I begin by thanking him both for himself and as president of Gresham College and of course as Lord mayor for the contribution he has made what he has said this evening and thank him also on behalf of the corporation for their hospitality today they and the Lord Mayor and the officers of the corporation have shown great interest in this occasion regarded it as as it is an extremely important piece of the city year and we at Gresham and I'm sure the Royal Society are equally grateful I'm Roderick flood the Provost of Gresham College and it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker today as the Lord Mayor said we're meeting particularly to celebrate the birthday of the Royal Society but in fact we're meeting to celebrate I think the association between four venerable British institutions of whom the Royal Society is actually the youngest it began with in Gresham College which itself was founded in 1597 and Gresham itself is an institution of the city which of course is several centuries older than that and the fourth institution I'm sure some of you can think of it is is Wadham College Oxford which celebrates its 400th anniversary today and has a claim to be the equal founder with Gresham of the Royal Society will be marking that Association by a conference in Oxford in a few weeks time over hundreds of years all these institutions have changed greatly but I think they've remained true to their original missions the corporation as the Lord mayor said is now the guardian of the greatest financial center in the world the Royal Society is the greatest scientific institution Gresham College continues to give as sir Thomas Gresham intended free public lectures in the city but those lectures are now seen or heard through the internet by a million people each year around the world only wadham college garden remains much as it was when warden Wilkins planned to launch from there his trip to meet the man in the moon an ambition which the Royal Society has so far not achieved many of these associations between these institutions have been marked by the splendid volume which our speaker today Bill Bryson edited earlier this year I'm tempted to describe him also as a British institution but certainly not a venerable one he is of course an example by birth by marriage and by digression of the close connections between this country in the United States and his books have illuminated and enlivened our two countries and much else and many parts of those two countries we're delighted that he is to speak to us today and I have much pleasure on behalf of Gresham College and the Royal Society for in inviting him to speak on an even shorter history of nearly everything mr. Bryson sheriff's are Lords ladies and gentlemen thank you very much Thank You Rodrick for those kind words of introduction I am thrilled and astounded to find myself standing here before you tonight this is a very great honor for me so thank you for making this possible for me right now as we're standing here all across my hometown Des Moines Iowa people are stopping whatever they're doing and they're saying what's that noise and the noise I can tell you is the sound of mrs. smalls my high school careers officer spinning in her grave after thought that Bill Bryson is now standing in the guild hall in London about to give a speech on behalf of Gresham College in the world Society so thank you very much for allowing me to have this very proud evening tonight now I must begin with a couple of small apologies apart from the obvious ones that I am NOT a lecturer that science is not my field and that I have a pathological inability to gauge how long any speech I write will actually take to deliver this could take 11 minutes so it could take an hour and a quarter there is simply no telling that I have one very big apology to start with and that's that essentially I have given the wrong title for my speech the I hat I've had a really crazy here if you could forgive me for that it was going to be a pretty crazy here anyway but then in June I had a book of my own come out and that always multiplies to hysterical proportions the number of requests I received to speak and do interviews and attend literary festivals and take part in other distracting events so it has been really quite distracted year and and when Barbara Anderson the kindly academic Registrar of Gresham College asked me earlier in the year what my topic for tonight would be in a moment of total preoccupation I said to her an even shorter history of everything and only much later in fact only in the last couple of weeks when I turned to this this obligation in earnest did it did it dawn on me that actually I'm supposed to be talking about the long history and glorious achievements of the Royal Society so what I propose to do this evening with your permission is I would like first of all to talk about the Royal Society and what it is done and why it is important to every one of us it is an issue that could hardly be more timely as we all gird ourselves for the spending cuts that are about to descend upon us then in case there is anyone here who's travelled down from Shetland to hear a lecture on on a short history of nearly everything I will give a really really short history of nearly everything the two topics do actually fit together after a fashion I think at least I hope so so first let me start with the Royal Society according to my most careful calculations the Royal Society was founded 350 years and 51 days ago actually 350 years 51 days and perhaps two or three hours ago it on a late November afternoon at a location about six hundred yards from where we are right now the site today is occupied by the enormous building that was long called the NatWest Tower and is now I understand called Tower 42 though in my view it doesn't get any more attractive however many times you changed the name but at that time it was the headquarters of Gresham College now we know that on that late wintry afternoon an audience of unknown size gathered to hear a young and not yet famous Christopher Wren give a lecture on astronomy and that afterwards 12 of those people Wren among them retired to the rooms of one Laurence rook and there agreed to form a society and for the first two years that is all they called it the society to promote the accumulation and propagation of useful knowledge now rather ambitiously they set the enrollment via 10 shillings ahead and the fee for attendance at the weekly meetings at 1 shilling that's equivalent in modern terms to 500 pounds to join and 50 pounds to hear the lectures a lot of money in other words these guys were very serious about what they were doing nobody had ever done anything quite like this before or would ever do it half so well as again it was truly a milestone event in human affairs what they were doing really was found in modern science and they seemed to know it the Royal Society it became royal with the granting of a charter in 1662 by charles ii a man who incidentally didn't ever pay a fee or attend a single meeting essentially established all the conventions of modern science it invented the scientific journal and the process of peer review it systematized experimentation it made English the primary language of scientific discourse in place of Latin though with one or two notable exceptions not least Newton's Principia which was published in Latin but even Newton then wrote most of his other papers are on optics for instance in English and it's fair to say that the primacy of English as the language of science dates from the founding of the Royal Society in addition the society promoted and indeed insisted upon clarity of expression in place of high-flown rhetoric and even more unusually encourage the coinage of new terms used precisely among the words introduced to the world by the Royal Society in its early days it seems were cohesion tension elasticity temperature and pharmacology from the outset the fellows of the Royal Society showed a tireless and an indeed at times breathtaking curiosity about almost everything nothing it seems was beneath their attention members discussed and considered woodland management blood transfusion architectural load bearing the behavior of gases the development of the pocket watch the thermal expansion expansion of glass and much much else before most people had ever even seen or tasted a potato the Royal Society debated the practicality of making it a staple crop in Ireland ironically as a hedge against famine two years after the Society's formation Christopher Merritt a founder member whose expertise was actually in birds demonstrated a method for fermenting wine twice over endowing it with a pleasing effervescence he had invented champagne the next year John Aubrey contributed a paper on the ancient stone monuments at Avebury in Wiltshire and so effectively created archaeology John Locke contributed a paper on the poisonous fish of the Bahamas Edmund Halley the great astronomer happened upon figures for annual births and deaths in Breslau in Silesia which fascinated him because they were so unusually complete now most people would have treated these figures as an interesting diversion but Hallie realized that from them he could construct charts from which it was possible to work out the life expectancy of any person at any point in his existence he could say that for someone age 25 the chances of dying in the next year were eighty to one against that someone who had reached the age of thirty could reasonably expect to live another twenty seven years and that the chances of a man of forty living in other seven years were five five and a half to one in his favor and so on he had in short produced the world's first actuarial tables and so made the life insurance industry possible again and again the Royal Society demonstrated that it was an institution dedicated not just to understanding the world but to changing it and improving it in any way it could often in the most unexpected ways now the names I've mentioned already just in the last minute or so are pretty telling John locked on Aubrey Edmund Halley Isaac Newton Christopher Wren and so on patently from the very beginning the Royal Society attracted the best minds this combination of great minds and boundless curiosity is obviously a good formula performing alerted society but that alone has actually not been enough to sustain 350 years of continuous distinction at the very highest level for that the Royal Society needed to do certain other things things that no other society had ever done before three in particular I think stand out excuse me first from its earliest days the Royal Society was truly international as they'd like to remind you at the Royal Society it had a foreign secretary a hundred years before the British government did just three years after its founding it accepted his first foreign members and soon it was welcoming papers from contributors like marchello Mao piggy in Italy and the great eccentric and wonderfully prolific micro scrap microscopist at 'invalid and hook in the Netherlands the result that it was became it became the central clearinghouse for scientific information in the world a kind of early version of the World Wide Web second the society has always elected people for their abilities rather than for their background or bearing it was the first really important institution in the world to be driven primarily by merit rather than considerations of breeding third and in many ways the most extraordinary of all the Royal Society has always had the most incredible knack for selecting people before they gave any particular hint to the greatness that would earn them their posterity Edmund Halley was made a fellow before he'd even finished at Oxford Charles Darwin elected in 1839 just three years after his youthful Beagle voyage was not even known for his work on barnacles much less on evolution when he became the fellow William Henry Fox Talbot was elevated to fellowship long before he had the first vague inkling of giving the world Photography it is extraordinary truly how many Fellows of the Royal Society achieved their greatest distinction after joining in consequence the Society didn't become a club of grand old men whose greatest achievements were behind them but rather a place whose members were firmly and excitingly at the leading edge of scientific development it is these additional aspects I would submit that are truly made through our society incomparable enduring and important indeed important ways beyond anything that anyone could ever foreseen or imagine when it was founded by way of illustration if I may let me cite three people three people all Fellows of the Royal Society whose stories I've come across completely by chance while researching other matters in the last year or so people whose importance to the world could not have been the same without the existence of the Royal Society the first of these I would offer is one of the great heroes of my own nation Benjamin Franklin who became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1756 nearly two decades before the political events that would make him famous to most of us it would be hard to think of anybody who better illustrates the wisdom of Royal Society policies than Franklin he absolutely absolutely personified that with everything the society stood for like so many others of that incredibly busy age he was into everything he considered how and why water evaporates from puddles what causes fossils why rock strata are so often tilted and jumbled he discovered and really quite brilliantly explained the gulfstream and very nearly elucidated the germ theory of disease a century before Pasteur he made many practical inventions bifocals and the lightning rod to name but to above all he became a foremost authority on electricity at a time when electricity was one of the most exciting mysteries of science among much else he created the world's first electric battery and coined the terms positive and negative in regard to electrical charge they were also familiar with Franklin's achievements and to thinking of him as an almost godlike figure certainly if you come from America that his is easy to forget that Franklin was a man who had practically no formal education and came from what was then a provincial backwater at the time he began his scientific experiments he was a journeyman printer in a far-off colony who had a talent for coining amusing aphorisms and that was about it he needed the Royal Society to give him confidence in stature and that it must assuredly did without the Royal Society Benjamin Frank the Benjamin Franklin who has come down through history could scarcely have existed interestingly by the way the one scientific thing Franklin didn't do it now seems was the one thing he is most famous for where I come from namely flying a kite in a thunderstorm to prove that lightning was indeed electrical it is a story still lovingly repeated in almost every American school book I mentioned it myself in my introduction to seeing further which is why I mention it again now here it appears in fact that Franklin didn't actually fly a kite into a thunderstorm and never actually claimed to have done so at least not exactly his report to the Royal Society merely described how such an experiment might be carried out the idea is you will remember was that Frank Franklin flew a kite in a storm and that dangling from the string near the end of his pilot was a key in a glass jar the key the kite attracted an electrical charge was traveled down the string to the key and made it rattle in the jar or so we were taught in school when I was a boy it was important for purposes of the experiment somehow the Franklin and the key be undercover and dry and so the kite was flown out a window the thing is you can't fly a kite out of window you just can't do it it's nearly impossible to get it launched and then if you did manage to get it launched it's all but impossible to control and maneuver more to the point if the string connecting the kite to the key did attract a bolt of lightning anyone foolish enough to be grounded to that the earth end would receive a positively enormous and almost certainly lethal jolt the key in his jar wouldn't tinkle gaily like a bell above a sharp doorway but would essentially explode like a stick of dynamite since Franklin understood the physics of lightning well enough to invent the lightning rod it's pretty nearly certain that he wouldn't have been rash enough to hold on to any length of string that was in danger of conducting an extremely robust charge of energy from a storm cloud to his arm now here's the thing it was Franklin's standing as a scientist that made him greatly admired in France and it was because of this admiration that the French were prepared to receive him as an important visitor and listened sympathetically to his appeal for financial support for the American cause during the American War of Independence without that support the American colonies could never have a state sustained and eventually prevailed in and a lengthy war so we may actually say that it is thanks to the Royal Society in some some tangential but absolutely crucial sense that America gained its independence from Britain for which I would like to say thank you even more incidentally it has also been said that when the new nation of America was debating what to call his chief executive it was Franklin who suggested the term president after the head of the Royal Society so thank you again you really cannot exaggerate the importance of the Royal Society's policy of openness to people from all backgrounds in all countries foreigners gave a new and additional perspective that it could not otherwise have had the reason Benjamin Franklin discerned the existence of the gulfstream was not simply because he was observant and had a scientific mind but because he crossed the Atlantic Ocean repeatedly and was exposed to its effects again and again it isn't enough in short just to have great minds but you have to have great minds at work in the right places and that brings us to my second hero whom I will mention much more briefly a man named Richard Carrington who was English and lived from 1826 to 1875 Carrington was one of the great examples of being in the right place at the right time I came upon him entirely by chance while reading about an event of great commercial importance the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859 by the man known to history as Colonel Edwin Drake even though he wasn't actually a colonel but rather a failed railway conductor the story as you may recall is that Drake and his business partners decided to drill for oil in Pennsylvania and everyone thought them completely mad for drilling but they persisted a great expense and eventually struck oil and is so doing laid the foundations for an industry that would eventually and utterly change the world now it so happens that at the very time the very week of this event the earth suffered a sudden great atmospheric disturbance of a type never before seen magnets and telegraph systems all over the world suddenly went haywire a Rory of unparalleled brilliance spread across the skies and became visible as far south as the Caribbean where they had obviously never been seen before the whole of Earth's atmosphere was suddenly in spectacularly in turmoil now the cause of this would have been a complete and worrisome mystery except that one man an amateur astronomer standing on Box Hill in Surrey happened to be watching the Sun at that very moment it was Richard Carrington Carrington was unusual in that he and that he spent more time looking at the Sun and its stars he was particularly interested in sunspots unfortunately he had very limited chance to exercise his interest in astronomy because he had to run the family business a very large brewery called the Royal brewery at Brentford in middle says so it was a rare treat for him to be able to get away but somehow on September 1st 1859 he managed to get a day off from the brewery and was standing on Box Hill where he kept a private observatory and was watching the Sun at exactly the moment that it erupted in an enormous flare of a type now known as a coronal mass ejection it was the biggest solar outburst that has ever been recorded today a similar outburst would communications all over the planet and caused unimaginable havoc and we know all about it simply because Richard Carrington happened to get it the right day off and to be probably the only man on the planet I was actually looking at the Sun at the right time Carrington became celebrated in astronomical circles and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society the following year the rest of his story is not quite so happy I'm sorry to say he grew increasingly deranged and argumentative and became famous for disrupting meetings of various astronomical societies quite late in life he married suddenly and unexpectedly a woman much younger than himself but soon afterwards both he and his wife died in strange and mysterious circumstances the suspicion has long been that he murdered her and then killed himself on the plus side however he left two thousand pounds to the Royal Society now I don't know quite what the moral of all that is so let me move swiftly on to my third example of unexpected ways in which the Royal Society makes the world a better place and that is the wonderful case of the Reverend Thomas Bayes 9 first came across Thomas Bayes while looking for notable vicars for a book I was working on and the book that was recently published called at home which is loosely about my own home and all directory in Norfolk my house is built in 1851 and one of the things that was notable about country parson in those days was that they were pretty generally pretty well-educated pretty well-off and had a lot of time on their hands and so many of them did a number of extraordinary things if I may quote from my own book sorry I lost the page the last thing I said to myself as I left to come here tonight was don't forget to mark that page bill this is just some examples of clergymen in the 19th century the sorts of things they did George buildin a vicar in a remote corner of Yorkshire had such poor attendances at his services that he converted converted half his church into a hen house but became a self-taught thority Authority in linguistics and compiled the world's first dictionary in Icelandic not far away Laurence Sterne vicar of the parish New York wrote popular novels of which the Lifan and opinions of Tristram Shandy gentleman is much the best remembered at Ben Cartwright rector of a rural parish in Leicestershire invented the power loom which in effect made the Industrial Revolution truly industrial in Devon the Reverend Jack Russell bred the terrier that shares his name while in Oxford the Reverend William Buckland wrote the first scientific description of dinosaurs and not incidentally became the world's leading authority on coprolites fossilized feces Thomas Robert Malthus in Surrey wrote an essay on the principle of population which is you will all recall from your school days suggested that increases in food supply could never keep up with population growth for mathematical reasons the Reverend William green well the Durham was a founding father of modern archaeology that he's better remembered among anglers as the inventor of Green Wells glory the most beloved of all trout flies in Dorset the perkily named October Octavius Picard Cambridge became the world's leading authority on spiders while his contemporary the Reverend William Sheppard wrote a history of dirty jokes John Clayton of York she gave the first practical demonstration of gas lighting the Reverend George Garrett of Manchester invented the submarine atom bubble bottle a botanist vicar in Essex was the eponymous inspiration for the flowering buddleja the Reverend John Mackenzie bacon the Berkshire was a pioneering hot-air balloons and the father of aerial photography and so it goes on it was just the most amazing run of distinction by my clergyman in the 19th century and indeed in the 18th century but perhaps the most extraordinary of all of these people and certainly my favorite was the Reverend Thomas Bayes whom I like so much that I included him not only in my own book but also in my introduction to seeing further Bayes was from Tunbridge Wells in Kent and he was by all accounts hope this preacher but a brilliant mathematician at some point he devised a very complex mathematical equation that has come to be known as the Bayes theorem the people who understand the theorem can use it to work out various probability distributions of all kinds it's a way of arriving at statistical likelihood based on partial information the remarkable feature of bayes's theorem is that it had no practical applications at all in his own lifetime you need very powerful computers to do the volume of calculations necessary to arrive at useful computations so in bayes's day it was simply an interesting but fundamentally pointless exercise bayes evidently thought so little of his theorem that it didn't even bother to publish it it was a friend who sent it to the Royal Society two years after Bayes his death where it was published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions in fact it was a milestone in the history of mathematics today bayes's theorem is used in countless ways in modeling climate change in interpreting radiocarbon dates and social policy astrophysics stock market analysis weather forecasting and wherever else probability is an issue and it exists today simply because nearly 250 years ago someone at the Royal Society decided it was worth preserving just in case I think that is the most marvelous thing now my point in mentioning these three particular examples is that you can hardly delve anywhere in any area of human endeavor not just in science and not find the Royal Society at the very heart of things which raises a fourth extraordinary point about the Royal Society it is still here more than that it is still here and it is still important now how many enterprises can you name that is still doing today what they were formed to do three hundred and fifty years ago today the Royal Society's interest remain an inspiration to recite it provides three hundred and fifty research fellowships and it's grants support the work of 3,000 scientists all over the world it bestows great numbers of medals and prizes maintains an active program of lectures and debates and also beloved summer science exhibition it acts as the scientific conscience of the nation it published a seven journals and an endless stream of papers it remains emphatically international in its outlook maintaining close links with 91 science academies around the world as I said in my introduction to the book if we have an earth worth living on 100 years from now the Royal Society will be one of the organizations our grandchildren will wish to thank it is impossible to list all the ways that the Royal Society has influenced the world but you can get some idea by typing in royal society as a word search in the electronic version of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that produces 218 pages of results that's just lists of names 218 pages of them it would take you 6 months to read through all of the entries it is more central to the life in history of Great Britain than most people realize if you removed from the historical record all that the fellows of the Royal Society have done you would have to rediscover or reinvent photography the internet bank holidays the theory of evolution antibiotics the understanding of gravity the unraveling of DNA the whole of the electronics industry Big Bang Theory and literally uncountable hundreds and hundreds of thousands of vital things more it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of science to this country historically and currently chemistry alone is worth 50 billion pounds a year to the British economy right now the prestige value simply cannot be measured Britain has just 1% of the world's people but produces by one reckoning 14% of the most frequently cited scientific papers that is a staggering they disproportionate a total and ought to be a source of pride to every single person in the country and yet science seems to be under a strange and relentless attack at the moment many of you will be familiar a few of you may even yet sting from an extraordinary broadside by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian earlier this summer against science and its costs he seemed to think that modern science is somehow a great scam and of course we are in the shadow of a looming spending cuts which are expected to hit science and research hard frankly I find that really disappointing the glory of this country the thing I admire more about it than any other is that in a really small space you produce an amazing amount of wonderfulness here in theater music art literature science and a great deal else if you take away men's tennis and World Cup football you are really fantastic at it would be a foolish tragedy to throw away any of that glorious unpredictable abundance of creative activity in any of those fields science not least because we somehow feel compelled to do a kind of mass penance for a brief spell of irrational exuberance by the financial world I just don't get that all of this was put into a certain perspective for me by an experience I had a year or so ago you know I'm chancellor at Durham University and in that position I often take I am taken to visit various departments and one of my visits last year they took me to the engineering department to see one of their new toys something called a radiofrequency anechoic chamber they explained to me that essentially it's just a soundproof chamber and I thought well how interesting can that be and then I got there and saw it and thought well not very evidently because it really was just a soundproof chamber with foam baffles it looked exactly like a radio broadcast booth only slightly roomier but it really didn't look anything much at all but what I learned is that in the hands of the amazingly dedicated in cerebrally supercharged people in Durham's engineering department this doll chamber may one day perform miracles by allowing engineers to control radio waves at ever finer resolutions it could change the world in a hundred ways it could provide a means to detect breast cancer so early that it never ever kills anyone again or find people who are lost in the wilderness if they're carrying a mobile phone even if it's switched on or that firemen look through walls and see who's trapped in burning buildings and a whole lot more and all this exciting potential is contained in just one small chamber in one corner of one department of one University which is of course just one with 114 British universities all doing dedicated research and that's not to mention all the Industrial and NHS and charitable research labs and so on all of them doing interesting and exciting things any one of which could fundamentally change the world the idea that any of that is expendable or surplus to requirements is simply bizarre now hold that thought for a moment please while we shift very quickly but I hope adroitly to our second topic which is a really really really short history of nearly everything now a few years ago as you may know I wrote a book called the short history of nearly everything which was my attempt to understand the world in the universe around it and how they got both got to be the way they are or as I put it in the book how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something and then how little about something eventually turned into us now one of the things that particularly fascinated me was how scientists figured things out how do they know where the continents were 300 million years ago or how hot it is on the surface of the Sun or what goes on at the heart of a gene or what was happening in the universe in its first three minutes how do they even know that the universe had the first three minutes and hasn't just been there forever how does anybody ever figure these things out and so the book became for me a kind of quest to find out not only what we know but how we know what we know and so for about four years I did almost nothing but try to understand science and its achievements I traveled to 11 countries on five continents read lots and lots of books and journals and transcripts and monographs and asked enormous amounts of really dumb questions of incredibly kind and patient experts from a variety of disciplines I didn't have any particular outcome in mind no axe to grind or anything like that I was just trying to pack an empty mind with as much interesting information as it could hold but in doing the book I found myself being drawn again and drawn again and again to certain inescapable conclusions about the universe and we live in our part in it for really remarkable facts I think they may be the four most remarkable facts there are and I would like to share those with you briefly now so here without ado they are the four most remarkable facts I know first you exist you're alive that's really quite a marvelous thing to be able to say when you stop and think about it for you to be here now trillions and trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to come together to make you and the whole history of the universe atoms have never got together quite this way before and they never will again these atoms came to earth from all over they could be anything but for some reason they've decided for a few tens of years to be you that's pretty extraordinary if you ask me now why atoms do this is a puzzle being you is not a gratifying experience for the animal an atom doesn't even know you're there it doesn't even know it's there atoms are mindless particles think after all they don't know a thing yet somehow for the length of your existence these tiny devoted particles will engage in all the delicate cooperative efforts necessary to keep you humming to make you you to give you form and shape and that you enjoy this the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life this is really hard to explain because there is nothing special about the atoms that make you a human being or any other living thing is an assortment of almost embarrassingly mundane components principally carbon hydrogen oxygen and nitrogen this is the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt the only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you that is of course the miracle of life but having obliging atoms is only part of the good fortune that got you here to Guildhall on quite a lovely evening in 2010 you've also been incredibly lucky genealogically ancestrally statistically speaking you shouldn't be here none of us should survival on earth is surprisingly hard work it is a curious fact of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at producing life but even better at extinguishing it of all the billions of species of organism that have sprung up and existed on earth in its long productive history 99.99% are no longer here they're gone forever the remarkable fact is that the normal condition for species on earth is to be extinct the average species on this planet lasts only about four million years if you wish to last longer as we must assuredly do then you must continually recreate yourself you must be prepared to change everything that defines you shape size color physiology diet metabolism everything introduced so repeatedly in the right sequence precisely the right historical moment for us to be here now it has been necessary for our ancestors to make all kinds of wholesale adjustments all of them random none of them inevitable or even necessarily logical but every one of them necessary to get us here today so we've been very lucky in that way too but even that's not enough you've also got nearly four billion years of reproductive good fortune behind you as an individual consider the fact that for you to be here now every one of your ancestors on both sides since the dawn of time has been attractive enough to find a mate robust enough to reproduce and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstance to live long enough to do so not one of your forebears in nearly 4 billion years on either side was squashed devoured stranded starved stuck fast picked by a more glamorous suitor spurned or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering the tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result eventually astoundingly and all too briefly in you I don't wish to belabor the point but life is a damn lucky thing when you stop to think about it your existence is a miracle and you really shouldn't let a day pass that you don't rejoice in having it which brings me to my second amazing fact life doesn't happen anywhere else in the universe as far as we know now that really is odd the atoms is so freely and congenial 'i clump together to form living things on earth seem entirely disinclined to do it do so elsewhere of course the evidence isn't all in yet so far astronomers have found only a few dozen or so planets beyond our own solar system out of the 10 billion trillion or so that are thought to exist so we can hardly claim to a scoured every corner of the you but it is certainly the case that the only life that is turned up so far and very possibly ever will is found on this one single unprepossessing blue planet in the name of the solar system two-thirds of the way out from the center of the Milky Way and that's not much in a great big universe particularly when you consider that all that life on that small blue planet is found almost exclusively in a frail wisp of water and atmosphere around the surface if you imagine that Earth's shrunk down to the size of a standard desktop robe then the atmosphere is only about the thickness of two coats of varnish and the part of that atmosphere that supports life the biosphere as it is known is only a small part of that most of the earth is too cold or dry or lofty and thin erred from those types of life humans even with the advantage of clothing and shelter can manage to live on only about 12% of Earth's landscape other animals are restricted further still in consequence most of us life is confined to an exceedingly modest range just 1.4 percent of Earth's land area contains more than half its biodiversity I can't think of a better reason than that to be worried about global warming which brings me to my third and penultimate amazing fact that we live on a planet that we don't really know there may be no other detectable life in the universe but there is such an abundance of it here on our own planet that we don't actually know how much there is we don't even remotely know I find that quite amazing even more amazing we don't even know what we know no one has ever managed to collate the total number of known living things on the planet most estimates for the number of named species of living things put it put it a figure of about one and a half million but that's really only a guess as for the number of unnamed yet to be identified species of living things we're even more clueless it may be tens of millions and maybe hundreds of millions but according to one extraordinary estimate perhaps as much as 97% of all that lives on the earth and in the seas is still to be discovered and so to my fourth amazing fact the last one I will burden you with here tonight I promise namely that all life comes from a single moment of creation some 3.8 million years ago in some bubbling mud pot or deep ocean vent some little bag of chemicals twitched and became animate and then miraculously reproduced itself everything that lives now on earth or ever has lived descends from that moment we are all built from a single original blueprint I don't believe there is a more important or remarkable fact in the natural world indeed in any world than that one since life arose earth is produced it's estimated some 30 billion different species of creature which is a much much much larger number than it sounds if you imagine that I projected slides of all those 30 billion creatures on a screen behind me at the rate of 1 a second it would take nearly a thousand years to get through them all 30 billion is a large number so Earth has produced a lot of life in its time and out of all that number of species just one has been smart enough and sensitive enough to reflect upon its place in the universe to manipulate the environment to make it more productive and secure to look beyond its own immediate needs and to work out strategies for improving its lot and only one the same one alas has been reckless enough for foolish enough to trifle with the air it breathes bulldoze its forests and jungles dynamite its coral reefs drive to extinction creatures on land sea and in the air we are in the uncanny position of being simultaneously life's best hope and its worst nightmare it is a mystery to me why it is so hard for us as beings to see how vulnerable we are to appreciate that we have all the water we're ever going to get the only air we're going to breathe we're not going to find new oceans teeming with life or some backup Amazonia that we have somehow till now overlooked we have all that we are ever going to have this is all there is there is nowhere else to go the most brilliant and thoughtful naturalist of our generation Edward or Wilson who is it goes without saying a fellow of the Royal Society put it better and more succinctly than anyone ever has in his classic work the diversity of life he wrote one planet one experiment it really is as that we are moving into a world that is very uncertain and very scary in all kinds of ways every problem we have will be solved by science or it won't be solved this really is no time for cutting well there's just one other thing that I learned about while research in my book about life it doesn't last very long I'm afraid even a good full human life goes on for only about 650,000 hours does it seem very much so there really isn't a moment to be lost I don't know about you but with that in mind I'm really going to enjoy a drink in a minute thank you all very very much ladies and gentlemen I'm sure everyone who came here this evening knew about Bryson they expected something wonderful they hadn't been disappointed I think he has succeeded as we all hoped in entertaining us informing us and edia uplifting us by this wonderful lecture and I think everything he has done today consolidates his position as one of Britain's national treasures young though he still is I would like since I'm standing here not only thank him for this lecture but I thank him for other things as well he has been a very good friend of the Royal Society he has advised us on many of the vents we've had in this anniversary year and indeed as editor of the book seeing further the story of science in the Royal Society he has done us a great service and I would like to put in a plug for that book and nnedi for his other book which he showed us during his lecture it's a wonderful book and I encourage you to to buy it and it's only so wonderful because of the inspiration and leadership of Bill Bryson I'd like also to express thanks at this point to the Lord Mayor of London the City of London Corporation for hosting this evening's lecture and also Gresham College for a significant role in organizing tonight's event just a historical remark as bill has told us the Royal Society's foundation was closely linked with that of Gresham College that is where the early fellows of our society met and they were of course all people who were fascinated by everything they were polymaths indeed they were all rather like Bill Bryson I imagine when they attended these meetings and did these mysterious experiments but just one anecdote the raw Society was thrown out of question College in 1666 in order to make way for the lord mayor and the city merchants that's because the guild hall was itself gutted in the grade fire and so that's another example of the links between the three organizations involved here tonight one point I would like to make which again bill alluded to in his lecture he emphasized that the early members of the Royal Society they call them to have ingenious and curious gentlemen they were fascinated by all kinds of weird things they did his experiments they heard travelers tales they did dissections etc but they were concerned also with the practical issues of their time with navigation with discovering how to measure longitude and of course most famously with rebuilding London after the fire so they returned to understand the world and to change the world and I think it's important to emphasize that that is equally true today although on a bigger scale the scientists in the Royal Society and in this country are very successful indeed in understanding nature and the world the UK is very strong in science we are second only to United States by almost all criteria and I think by many criteria you could say there's more grain for the buck here than in any other country and a rather few areas of national life where we can say we are number two in the world so let's not jeopardize those where that is now the case and science in this country is not only done in universities by people motivated in the same way as the pioneer of Hazard rural Society but of course it permeates the whole of the economy and indeed I think everyone would accept that if the UK is to thrive and embark on a high growth high tech led economy then we can do this only if we ensure that bright people are attracted into science taught well in our universities and encouraged and the Rosses house aim is to ensure that this happens and we hope that our political masters are receptive to this it requires a collaboration between scientists in academia and in industry and the Royal Society itself very concerned about this we try to ensure that the young scientists we support are made aware of what they can do in industry given course in entrepreneurship etc and also we are indeed setting up a small venture capital fund called the Enterprise Fund in order by example as well as by precept to encourage early stage investment in high-tech companies so for all these reasons I hope it is the case as bill said that the Royal Society is relevant to the UK today and indeed detectives are crucial for the future so let me once again thank our hosts and friends here in the city in the City of London Corporation and Gresham College for arranging this event and once again to ask you to express your thanks for really a fascinating I'm a different lecture which you've been privileged to hear from Bill Bryson thank you you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 108,111

Rating: 4.7442274 out of 5

Keywords: Bill Bryson, Bryson, History of Science, Science, Nearly Everything, Royal Society, Gresham College, Guildhall, City of London, London Guildhall, Lecture, Talk, Education, Lord Rees, Roderick Floud

Id: -vHoNVjbDdc

Length: 55min 59sec (3359 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/ultimatt42]

Title	An Even Shorter History of Nearly Everything
Speaker	Bill Bryson
Date	30 September 2010
Location	Guildhall, London (Great Hall)
Download	MP4
Transcript	Available here
Summary	Bill Bryson, author of the popular book on the history of science A Short History of Nearly Everything and editor of Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society, speaks on the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge about the history of the Royal Society and some of its notable members. He finishes the lecture with a "really really really short history of nearly everything" as illustrated by four remarkable facts he encountered in researching his book, and an impassioned appeal to maintain science funding in an age of austerity and budget cuts.

	Table of Contents
@00:00	Introduction by The Right Honorable Lord Mayor of London, Nick Anstee
@05:04	Introduction by Sir Roderick Floud, Provost of Gresham College
@09:03	Lecture begins
@12:07	A short history of the Royal Society
@17:47	The Royal Society: International, driven by merit, and keenly insightful at selecting new fellows
@20:03	Benjamin Franklin as a fellow of the Royal Society
@25:00	Richard Carrington, the right man in the right place at the right time
@28:20	Reverend Thomas Bayes and Bayes' theorem
@33:09	The Royal Society's influence in the present and the future
@38:46	Fact #1: Statistically speaking, you shouldn't be here
@44:16	Fact #2: Life doesn't happen anywhere else, as far as we know
@45:51	Fact #3: We live on a planet we don't really know
@46:42	Fact #4: All life comes from a single moment of creation
@49:06	Conclusion
@49:55	Thanks given by Baron Rees of Ludlow, President of the Royal Society
@53:18	End of video

[u/lazyitus]

Very interesting and enjoyable. Thanks for posting.

[u/[deleted]]

Oh man, nice find. I'm really looking forward to watching this tomorrow, thanks for sharing.