Bill Bryson's 2003 journey through the history of science — covering the big bang, evolution, plate tectonics, quantum mechanics, and human origins — told through the stories of the eccentric scientists who made the discoveries, winning the Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
Made the history of scientific discovery genuinely entertaining — Bryson's humanizing focus on scientists as weird, competitive, flawed humans (rather than noble truth-seekers) and his talent for scale (the universe is unfathomably large; atoms are unfathomably small) made science history feel like adventure.
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