　　这是一部有关现代科学发展史的既通俗易懂又引人入胜的书，作者用清晰明了、幽默风趣的笔法，将宇宙大爆炸到人类文明发展进程中所发生的繁多妙趣横生的故事一一收入笔下。惊奇和感叹组成了这本书，历历在目的天下万物组成了这本书，益于人们了解大千世界的无穷奥妙，掌握万事万物的发展脉络。本书2003年5月在美国出版后，连续数十周高居《纽约时报》、《泰晤士报》排行榜最前列，在年度科学图书排行榜中，本书更是勇夺桂冠！

内容简介

One of the world’s most beloved writers and bestselling author of One Summer takes his ultimate journey—into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.

In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail—well, most of it. In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.

　　这是一部有关现代科学发展史的既通俗易懂又引人入胜的书，作者用清晰明了、幽默风趣的笔法，将宇宙大爆炸到人类文明发展进程中所发生的繁多妙趣横生的故事一一收入笔下。惊奇和感叹组成了本书，历历在目的天下万物组成了本书，益于人们了解大千世界的无穷奥妙，掌握万事万物的发展脉络。
　　书中回溯了科学史上那些伟大与奇妙的时刻，引用了近年来发现的最新科学史料，几乎每一个被作者描述的事件都奇特而且惊人：宇宙起源于一个要用显微镜才能看得见的奇点；全球气候变暖可能会使北美洲和欧洲北部地区变得更加寒冷；1815年印度尼西亚松巴哇岛坦博士拉火山喷发，喷涌而出的熔岩以及相伴而来的海啸夺走了10万人的生命；美国黄石国家公园是“世界上最大的活火山”……而那些沉迷于科学的科学家们也是千奇百怪：达尔文居然为蚯蚓弹起了钢琴；牛顿将一根大针眼缝针插进眼窝，为的只是看看会有什么事情发生；富兰克林不顾生命危险在大雷雨里放风筝；卡文迪许在自己身上做电击强度实验，竟然到了失去知觉的地步……
　　本书在讲述科学的奇迹与成就的同时，还浸润着浓郁的悲天悯人的人文关怀。全书从科学发展史的角度对“我们从哪里来？我们是谁？我们到哪里去？”这一千古命题作了极为精当的阐释，每一个人在阅读此书之后，都会对生命、对人生、对我们所生活的世界产生全新的感悟。一位美国小读者的父亲说，读过《万物简史》之后，他对死亡不再感到恐惧……作者认为，这是一本书所能获得的最高评价。

作者简介

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. For twenty years he lived in England, where he worked for the Times and the Independent, and wrote for most major British and American publications. His books include travel memoirs (Neither Here Nor There; The Lost Continent; Notes from a Small Island) and books on language (The Mother Tongue; Made in America). His account of his attempts to walk the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods, was a huge New York Times bestseller. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with his wife and his four children.

　　比尔·布莱森，享誉世界的旅游文学作家。1951年出生于美国艾奥瓦州，毕业于美国德雷克大学。从1973年起，曾在英国居住20年之久，任职于《泰晤士报》与《独立报》，同时也为《纽约时报》、《国家地理杂志》等刊物撰文。后搬回美国，现与妻子和四个小孩居住于新罕布什尔州的汉诺威市。
　　布莱森擅长用不同的眼光来看待他所游历的世界，在他的书里，英国式的睿智幽默与美国式的搞笑绝妙地融合在了一起。他的尖刻加上他的博学，让他的文字充满了幽默、机敏和智慧，使他自己成为“目前活在世上的最有趣的旅游文学作家”（《泰晤士报》）。
　　代表作有《哈！小不列颠》、《欧洲在发酵》、《一脚踩进小美国》、《别跟山过不去》、《请问这里是美国吗？》等多种，每本均高居美、英、加畅销书排行榜前列。其中《哈！小不列颠》更被英国读者推选为“最能深刻传达出英国灵魂的作品”。
　　作者不但才华横溢，兴趣亦十分广泛，在语言学方面著有《麻烦词汇词典》、《母语》、《美式英语》等书，皆为拥有广大拥趸的幽默之作。

精彩书评

"Stylish [and] stunningly accurate prose. We learn what the material world is like from the smallest quark to the largest galaxy and at all the levels in between . . . brims with strange and amazing facts . . . destined to become a modern classic of science writing."
--The New York Times

"Bryson has made a career writing hilarious travelogues, and in many ways his latest is more of the same, except that this time Bryson hikes through the world of science."
--People

"Bryson is surprisingly precise, brilliantly eccentric and nicely eloquent . . . a gifted storyteller has dared to retell the world's biggest story."
--Seattle Times

"Hefty, highly researched and eminently readable."
--Simon Winchester, The Globe and Mail

"All non-scientists (and probably many specialized scientists, too) can learn a great deal from his lucid and amiable explanations."
--National Post

"Bryson is a terrific stylist. You can't help but enjoy his writing, for its cheer and buoyancy, and for the frequent demonstration of his peculiar, engaging turn of mind."
--Ottawa Citizen

"Wonderfully readable. It is, in the best sense, learned."
--Winnipeg Free Press

前言/序言

1 HOW TO BUILD A UNIVERSE
NO MATTER HOW hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small.
A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least.
Now imagine if you can (and of course you can't) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe.
I'm assuming of course that you wish to build an inflationary universe. If you'd prefer instead to build a more old-fashioned, standard Big Bang universe, you'll need additional materials. In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is--every last mote and particle of matter between here and the edge of creation--and squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a singularity.
In either case, get ready for a really big bang. Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no where. When the universe begins to expand, it won't be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.
It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there--whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.
And so, from nothing, our universe begins.
In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements--principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.
When this moment happened is a matter of some debate. Cosmologists have long argued over whether the moment of creation was 10 billion years ago or twice that or something in between. The consensus seems to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years, but these things are notoriously difficult to measure, as we shall see further on. All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.
There is of course a great deal we don't know, and much of what we think we know we haven't known, or thought we've known, for long. Even the notion of the Big Bang is quite a recent one. The idea had been kicking around since the 1920s, when Georges Lem tre, a Belgian priest-scholar, first tentatively proposed it, but it didn't really become an active notion in cosmology until the mid-1960s when two young radio astronomers made an extraordinary and inadvertent discovery.
Their names were Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communications antenna owned by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a persistent background noise--a steady, steamy hiss that made any experim A Short History of Nearly Everything万物简史英文原版 [平装] 下载 mobi epub pdf txt 电子书格式