INTRODUCTION

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    Wele. And gratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasnteasy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

    To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemblein an intricate and intriguingly obliging mao create you. Its an arra sospecialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will o this once. Forthe  many years (we hope) these tiny particles will unplainingly engage in all thebillions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intad let you experiehesupremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.

    Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experiehe atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms dont actually care about you-indeed, dont even know that you are there. They dont even know that they are there. They aremindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notionthat if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, oom at a time, you would produce amound <bdo>..</bdo>of fiomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once beenyou.) Yet somehow for the period of your existehey will ao a single overargimpulse: to keep you you.

    The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting-fleeting indeed.

    Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modestmilestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atomswill shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And thats it for you.

    Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesnt, sofar as we  tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and geniallyflock together to form living things oh are exactly the same atoms that dee to do itelsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane:

    carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting ofother very ordinary elements-nothing you wouldnt find in any ordinary drugstore-and thatsall you he only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you.

    That is of course the miracle of life.

    Whether or not atoms make life in other ers of the universe, they make plenty else;ihey make everything else. Without them there would be no water or air or rocks, nostars and plas, no distant gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things thatmake the universe so usefully material. Atoms are so numerous and necessary that we easilyoverlook that they  actually exist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fillitself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and th<bdo></bdo>e other physicalproperties on which our existence hihere  actually be a universe at all. For theloime there wasnt. There were no atoms and no universe for them to float about in.

    There was nothing-nothing at all anywhere.

    So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble insuch a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive iwenty-first tury and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of araordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival oh is a surprisingly trickybusiness. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed sihedawn of time, most-99.99 pert-are no longer around. Life oh, you see, is not onlybrief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existehat we e from aplahat is very good at promoting life but eveer at extinguishing it.

    The average species oh lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to bearound for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must beprepared to ge everything about yourself-shape, size, color, species affiliatiohing-and to do so repeatedly. Thats much easier said than done, because the process ofge is random. To get from &quot;protoplasmal <bdo></bdo>primordial atomic globule&quot; (as the Gilbert andSullivan song put it) to se upright modern human has required you to mutate raitsover and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at variousperiods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grownfins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek,been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse,and a million things more. The ti deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and youmight now be lig algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore  air through a blowhole iop of your head before diving sixty feet for amouthful of delicious sandworms.

    Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached siime immemorial to a favoredevolutionary line, but you have also beeremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in yourpersonal ary. sider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older thahs mountains and rivers and os, every one of your forebears on both sides has beenattractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and suffitly blessed by fateand circumstao live long enough to do so. Not one of your perti aors wassquashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwisedeflected from its lifes quest of delivering a tiny charge of geic material to the rightpart the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditarybinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.

    This is a book about how it happened-in particular hoent from there being nothing atall to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and alsosome of what happened iween and sihats a great deal to cover, of course, which iswhy the book is called A Short History of Nearly Everything, even though it isnt really. Itcouldnt be. But with luck by the time we finish it will feel as if it is.

    My own starting point, for what its worth, was an illustrated sce book that I had as aclassroom text when I was in fourth or fifth grade. The book was a standard-issue 1950sschoolbookbattered, unloved, grimly hefty-but he front it had an illustration that justcaptivated me: a cutaway diagram showing the Earths interior as it would look if you cut intothe pla with a large knife and carefully withdrew a wedge representing about a quarter ofits bulk.

    Its hard to believe that there was ever a time when I had not seen su illustrationbefore, but evidently I had not for I clearly remember being transfixed. I suspect, in hoy,my initial i was based on a private image of streams of unsuspeg eastboundmotorists in the Ameri plains states plunging over the edge of a sudden 4,000-mile-highcliff runniweeral Amerid the North Pole, but gradually my attention did turnin a more scholarly mao the stific import of the drawing and the realization that theEarth sisted of discrete layers, ending in the ter with a glowing sphere of iron andnickel, which was as hot as the surface of the Sun, acc to the caption, and I rememberthinking with real wonder: &quot;How do they know that?&quot;I didnt doubt the correess of the information for an instant-I still tend to trust thepronous of stists in the way I trust those of surgeons, plumbers, and otherpossessors of are and privileged information-but I couldnt for the life of me ceive howany human mind could work out aces thousands of miles below us, that no eye hadever seen and no X ray could pee, could look like and be made of. To me that was just amiracle. That has been my position with sce ever since.

    Excited, I took the book home that night and ope before dinner-an a that I expepted my mother to feel my forehead and ask if I was all right-and, starting with the firstpage, I read.

    And heres the thing. It wasing at all. It wasnt actually altogether prehensible.

    Above all, it didnt answer any of the questions that the illustration stirred up in a normalinquiring mind: How did we end up with a Sun in the middle of our pla? And if it isburning away down there, why isnt the ground under our feet hot to the touch? And why isntthe rest of the interior melting-or is it? And when the core at last burns itself out, will some ofthe Earth slump into the void, leaving a giant sinkhole on the surface? And how do you knowthis? How did you figure it out?

    But the author was strangely silent on such details-indeed, silent ohing butanties, synes, axial faults, and the like. It was as if he wao keep the good stuffsecret by making all of it soberly unfathomable. As the years passed, I began to suspect thatthis was not altogether a private impulse. There seemed to be a mystifying universalspiracy amobook authors to make certaierial they dealt with rayedtoo he realm of the mildly iing and was always at least a longdistance phone callfrom the frankly iing.

    I now know that there is a happy abundance of sce writers who pen the most lucid andthrilling prose-Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey, and Tim Flannery are three that jump out froma siation of the alphabet (and thats not even to mentioe but godlike RichardFeynman)-but sadly none of them wrote abook I ever used. All mine were written bymen (it was always men) who held the iing notion that everything became clear whenexpressed as a formula and the amusingly deluded belief that the children of America wouldappreciate having chapters end with a se of questions they could mull over in their owntime. So I grew up vihat sce was supremely dull, but suspeg that it be, and not really thinking about it at all if I could help it. This, too, became my position for along time.

    Then much later-about four or five years ago-I was on a long flight across the Pacific,staring idly out the window at moonlit o, when it occurred to me w<mark>9９ｌib?</mark>ith a certainunfortable forcefulhat I didnt know the first thing about the only pla I was evergoing to live on. I had no idea, for example, why the os were salty but the Great Lakeswerent. Didnt have the fai idea. I didnt know if the os were growing more saltywith time or less, and whether o salinity levels was something I should be edabout or not. (I am very pleased to tell you that until the late 1970s stists didnt know theao these questioher. They just didnt talk about it very audibly.)And o salinity of course represented only the merest sliver of my ignorance. I didntknow what a proton was, or a protein, didnt know a quark from a quasar, didnt uandhow geologists could look at a layer of ro a yon wall and tell you how old it was,didnt know anything really. I became gripped by a quiet, unwonted urge to know a littleabout these matters and to uand how people figured them out. That to me remaihegreatest of all amazements-how stists work things out. How does anybody know howmuch the Earth weighs or how old its rocks are or what really is way down there ier? How  they know how and when the universe started and what it was like when itdid? How do they know what goes on inside an atom? And how, e to that-or perhapsabove all- stists so ofteo know nearly everything but then still t prediearthquake or even tell us whether we should take an umbrella with us to the raextWednesday?

    So I decided that I would devote a portion of my life-three years, as it now turns out-toreading books and journals and finding saintly, patient experts prepare??o answer a lot ofoutstandingly dumb questions. The idea was to see if it isnt possible to uand andappreciate-marvel at, enjoy even-the wonder and aplishments of sce at a level thatisnt too teical or demanding, but isirely superficial either.

    That was my idea and my hope, and that is what the book that follows is inteo be.

    Anyway, we have a great deal of ground to cover and much less than 650,000 hours in whichto do it, so lets begin.

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