A Short History of Everything ... by Bill Bryson.

Unremitting scientific effort over the past 300 years has yielded an astonishing amount of information about the world we inhabit. By rights we ought to be very impressed and extremely interested. Unfortunately many of us simply aren't. Far from attracting the best candidates, science is proving a less and less popular subject in schools. And, with a few notable exceptions, popular books on scientific topics are a rare bird in the bestseller lists. Bill Bryson, the travel-writing phenomenon, thinks he knows what has gone wrong. The anaemic, lifeless prose of standard science textbooks, he argues, smothers at birth our innate curiosity about the natural world. Reading them is a chore rather than a voyage of discovery. Even books written by leading scientists, he complains, are too often clogged up with impenetrable jargon. Just like the alchemists of old, scientists have a regrettable tendency to "vaile their secrets with mistie speech". Science, John Keats sulked, "will clip an Angel's wings, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line." Bryson turns this on its head by blaming the messenger rather than the message. Robbing nature of its mystery is what he thinks most science books do best. But, unlike Keats, he doesn't believe that this is at all necessary. We may be living in societies less ready to believe in magic, miracles or afterlives, but the sublime remains. Rather as Richard Dawkins has argued, Bryson insists that the results of scientific study can be wondrous and very often are so. The trick is to write about them in a way that makes them comprehensible without crushing nature's mystique. Bryson provides a lesson in how it should be done. The prose is just as one would expect - energetic, quirky, familiar and humorous. Bryson's great skill is that of lightly holding the reader's hand throughout; building up such trust that topics as recondite as atomic weights, relativity and particle physics are shorn of their terrors. The amount of ground covered is truly impressive. From the furthest reaches of cosmology, we range through time and space until we are looking at the smallest particles. We explore our own planet and get to grips with the ideas, first of Newton and then of Einstein, that allow us to understand the laws that govern it. Then biology holds centre-stage, heralding the emergence of big-brained bipeds and Charles Darwin's singular notion as to how it all came about. Crucially, this hugely varied terrain is not presented as a series of discrete packages. Bryson made his name writing travelogues and that is what this is. A single, coherent journey, woven together by a master craftsman. The book's underlying strength lies in the fact that Bryson knows what it's like to find science dull or inscrutable. Unlike scientists who turn their hand to popular writing, he can claim to have spent the vast majority of his life to date knowing very little about how the universe works. Tutored by many of the leading scientists in each of the dozens of fields he covers, he has brought to the book some of the latest insights together with an amusingly gossipy tone. His technique was to keep going back to the experts until each in turn was happy, in effect, to sign off the account of their work he had put together. In short, he's done the hard work for us. Bryson enlivens his accounts of difficult concepts with entertaining historical vignettes. We learn, for example, of the Victorian naturalist whose scientific endeavours included serving up mole and spider to his guests; and of the Norwegian palaeontologist who miscounted the number of fingers and toes on one of the most important fossil finds of recent history and wouldn't let anyone else have a look at it for more than 48 years. Bryson has called his book a history, and he has the modern historian's taste for telling it how it was. Scientists, like all tribes, have a predilection for foundation myths. But Bryson isn't afraid to let the cat out of the bag. The nonsense of Darwin's supposed "Eureka!" moment in the Galapagos, when he spotted variations in the size of finch beaks on different islands, is swiftly dealt with. As is the fanciful notion of palaeontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott chancing on the fossil-rich Burgess Shales after his horse slipped on a wet track. So much for clarity and local colour. What about romance? For Bryson this clearly lies in nature's infinitudes. The sheer improbability of life, the incomprehensible vastness of the cosmos, the ineffable smallness of elementary particles, and the imponderable counter-intuitiveness of quantum mechanics. He tells us, for example, that every living cell contains as many working parts as a Boeing 777, and that prehistoric dragonflies, as big as ravens, flew among giant trees whose roots and trunks were covered with mosses 40 metres in height. It sounds very impressive. Not all readers will consider it sublime, but it's hard to imagine a better rough guide to science. ·

John Waller is research fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine and author of Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery.

Silence is golden

In an increasingly busy and stressful world, more and more of us are visiting retreats in an attempt to stay sane. All we want, it seems, is peace, quiet - and a space to be alone, says Kate Kellaway Sunday June 12, 2005 The Observer When Greta Garbo said: 'I want to be alone', it sounded like a spoilt joke. Peter Cook thought so: he drove through London in an open-top car, dressed as Garbo, and bellowed through a megaphone: 'I WANT TO BE ALONE.' But there are times when the wish to be alone or silent isn't a gag at all. Tap the word 'retreat' into Google and an astonishing number of options appear: Christian, Buddhist, Zen, Sufi, New Age. The desire to find peace and solitude, according to the British Retreat Association, has never been so strong. They are the opposite of the contented British workforce described in Richard Reeves's book Happy Mondays. They want flexible hours - and time out. Hutton believes there is a growing number in this camp, looking for 'inner calm' (he thinks it significant that hits on the foundation's website on work/life balance have more than quadrupled in two years). Madeleine Bunting's book Willing Slaves (in which she argues that we conspire to allow our employers to own us) adds grist to this mill. And when I ask Bunting if she has ever been on retreat, she answers: 'Of course.' Adam Phillips, the pyschoanalyst and writer, is not surprised by the growing popularity of retreats: 'People are aware of having too many external stimuli. What do you hear when you stop listening? The question is about whether anyone has an internal world any more.' Mobile phones make us incessantly - often pointlessly - available. (How would Wordsworth have got on wandering lonely as a cloud with a mobile ringing in his pocket?) And portable email machines, as some Blackberry users are already complaining, are a refinement too far. We are noise junkies, equipped to communicate 24/7. Not surprisingly, the British Retreat Association is extending its annuual National Quiet Day to cover the whole of next weekend. Retreats have even made it on to reality TV. The recent BBC2 series The Monastery was about five men, including one from Belfast involved with the UDA in his youth and another who produced trailers for a sex chat line, who spent 40 days and 40 nights in a Benedictine monastery. It had a profound effect on the men involved and, I imagine, on 2.5 million viewers. I have been amazed to discover how many -people I know have been on retreats but never mentioned them. Retreats are not like summer holidays. They are not a subject for small talk. Besides, silence resists words. Almost everyone I talked to preferred not to be quoted under their real name. One of my friends summed up a general feeling: 'We are endlessly reactive. Even people whose lives seem very successful are asking, "Where is the silence in this? Where is the space to confront mortality or who you are?"' One, told her husband: 'I have got to have five days to myself.' The year had been tough: 'I had been getting really bad tempered. I was starting to crave being on my own in an almost obsessive way. Time alone is important. People are scared to take it or feel it is self-indulgent. It didn't feel self-indulgent to me at all. It felt like a priority - and it wasn't that I was cracking up.' She took 'five squeezed-out days' in Cornwall. It was the first time she had been on her own for more than 10 years. How did it get to 10 years? she wondered as she travelled first class (her only nod to luxury) to Cornwall. She resolved not to talk to anyone (except buying tickets etc). She rented a two-person (twice the space she needed) cottage with a view of the sea, 'a beautiful little spot that I came upon'. And she chose to do things that might have been unpopular with her family. She hired a bike (her husband hates cycling). She read for hours. She went for long walks along the coast. She did not bother to cook. She ate fruit and yoghurt. She got up when it suited her. 'So much of my life is about making other people's lives work. I don't think very much about who I am.' Before she left, she was apprehensive: 'Who am I under all this chaos?' She need not have worried. She loved the sense that 'no one knew where I was; it was very liberating'. She switched off her mobile. There was no television. She was rejuvenated, although: 'I didn't feel like some wisp of a lass. I felt mature - I am nearly 40 - cycling uphill. I didn't care what people thought. The neighbours were curious. I was polite to them, but I wasn't about to chat. I felt this was more important than going away with my husband. I have a happy, loving family life but I didn't miss them at all. I didn't feel in the least bit guilty; I felt I deserved it.' Until four years ago, Caitlin had a high-powered job. The time away made her feel she could define herself again outside the role of a mother and wife: 'It was good to feel I was still there beneath all the other layers of my life.' When she came back, other mothers told her that she looked different, as if she had somehow grown. Some thought it was a brilliant idea to go, others were envious. There were several who could not understand why she wanted to do it at all. Nick lives on his own but still feels the need for retreat. He used to work in publishing, but now runs a rare-plant nursery in Hertfordshire. It was through gardening that he learned something about silence. 'I went to Scotland and to the Pyrenees. I spent years working in isolated places and whole days gardening, potting up, sowing seeds in silence. Gardening is a meditative activity: you lose a sense of personality. It starts to fall away, all those theatrical props we use to manage the world. All those emotions generated by the ego fall away.' Now he sometimes goes on Buddhist retreats. He needs the rest and he loves the silence. Adam Phillips says that the hope, though it may be a fantasy, is that 'silence is unmediated contact with the self that brings you closer to authenticity'. He thinks: 'Words are often a way of not listening, talking a part of one's armour.' For many people, retreat is to do with 'a disillusionment about the value of communication, despair about relationship'. For David, who grew up in Northern Ireland and went on retreats as a schoolboy, silence was a way of contending with grief. And, though no longer a Catholic, he knew the value of retreating. For some people, psychotherapeutic retreats are more attractive than those with any religious content. Freya, a mother and writer, experienced the Hoffman Process, described as the Rolls-Royce of self-help retreats ('years of therapy distilled into eight intensive days'). It sounds hair-raising. But Freya says it effectively saved a friend's marriage. She told herself: 'I figured it couldn't hurt, even though it cost two grand a week. The idea is you come to understand and forgive your parents. It is visceral. There is lots of shouting, crying, bashing of things with bats and cushions.' Not a silent retreat, then? 'Had I known how much of that there would be, I might not have gone. I had blisters on my hands.' But there are hours of silence, too, and speechless meals. 'Your self-consciousness is eroded. As an only child, I am hugely resistant to group therapy. But I made friends for life. You learn that you are on other people's journey and they are on yours. But most of the profound stuff happens in silence; you are broken down, built up, put back together again.' Apparently, when people go on week-long retreats, they often spend the first couple of days asleep. But I had only one day of institutionalised peace and was determined to stay awake. · The Retreat Association….. Do you ever want to step out of your life? What are your experiences? Email us at review@observer.co.uk