A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

If you are like me, meaning your brain refuses to understand or remember scientific facts, this is a great book. It is very "big picture" about our understanding of the world, and made me want to do some more science reading. I was always frustrated in school (particularly during physics) when we spent a long time on ideas that we now know to be wrong, but Bryson makes the history of science interesting by giving details about what strange (and often petty) people scientists were and are. It also helps to show that we have so much left to learn.

There is no thesis to this book, so unlike Guns, Germs, and Steel, which hits you over the head with a point over and over again, this one just keeps moving. If there were a thesis it would be: scientists are weirdos. Bryson's writing is easy and enjoyable—many of the blurbs refer to his wit, and here is one more:

"Bryson's wit is as sharp as his tongue: pink, and covered in beard hairs."

A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (1988)

Over the last few decades, A Brief History of Time has gained notoriety as a pop science book that everyone bought but could not get through due to it being completely impenetrable. Theoretical physics was hella trendy in the early 1990s, like C&C Music Factory.

I found an old copy for $6 at a used book store in Kyoto as I was fleeing catastrophe in Tokyo, so I decided to see if I was smart enough these days to actually understand Hawking. Good news is that the book is gentle at first. But without warning, Hawking's prose suddenly starts flailing between dumbed-down metaphors for theoretical physics and the most obscure fragments from a PhD thesis. Hawking will string you along with easy-peasy discussions of black holes and entropy. And the next sentence, he'll write, "If the laws of science are unchanged by the combination of operations C and P, and also by the combination of C, P, and T, they must also be unchanged under the operation T alone." And then he ends the same paragraph, "If it were, crockery manufacturers would go out of business." This book is a goddamn roller-coaster ride.

I compromised on my goals and stopped reading before the last chapter on worm holes. But I did enjoy the book as an introduction to why we know what we do about the nature of the universe. The best part is that we predicted a lot of what make up the cool illustrations in astronomy books — black holes, neutron stars, etc. — through mathematical formulas. If deduction actually works somewhere, I'm happy it's with the laws of the universe.