'A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING :' Atoms the Size of Peas

A ''SHORT'' history of ''nearly everything''? No way. The world's too big and it's been around far too long for that, I thought, so any such project had to be doomed from the start. One of two things had to be true: either the author had gone into a small number of sciences too deeply, in which case he'd lose himself and the reader in a sea of dense jargon-laden error-riddled detail, or else in an attempt to keep things clear, uncomplicated and breezy, he'd oversimplify a large number of topics to the point of caricature. Steering a middle course between these extremes seemed too much to hope for. Worse, the author was described on the jacket as ''one of the world's most beloved and best-selling writers,'' another irritant, and so the book came across as an engraved invitation: ''Find fault with me.'' That, anyhow, was my attitude at the beginning.

Bill Bryson, hitherto principally a travel writer, had gotten into the project when on a plane flight to his latest exotic destination he peered out the cabin window, beheld the wide moonlit oceanscape below, and all at once it struck him, ''with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness,'' he says, ''that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.'' He didn't know, for example, why the ocean was salty but inland lakes weren't. He didn't know how much the earth weighed, or how it was possible to tell. What was a protein? How big was an atom? When and how did the universe start? ''Didn't have the faintest idea,'' he reports.

So he ransacked the sciences, read books and articles, consulted the experts, and he found out. Or at least he did most of the time: as he learned early on in the game, the experts themselves were sometimes not too clear about certain issues. The origin of the universe, for one, remained a puzzle. It arose, Bryson says, ''from nothing,'' at a point when time didn't exist and there was no space anywhere. It just started.

''So what caused it?'' he asks. Something: '' 'a false vacuum' or 'a scalar field' or 'vacuum energy' -- some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was.''

Well, I guess so. Still, in all fairness early cosmology theories are a bunch of speculations that even in the 21st century bear awkward resemblances to ancient tribal creation myths.

Matters could only improve from there, and they did. In fact, the more I read of ''A Short History of Nearly Everything,'' the more I was convinced that Bryson had achieved exactly what he'd set out to do, and, moreover, that he'd done it in stylish, efficient, colloquial 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. The basic facts of physics, chemistry, biology, botany, climatology, geology -- all these and many more are presented with exceptional clarity and skill.

So are profiles of some engaging nuts, for Bryson, it turns out, has a fatal weakness for the mad scientists of yore: Henry Cavendish, for example, the chemist who so much hated human contact that he forbade people to touch, speak to or even look at him, and communicated with his housekeeper by means of notes. Isaac Newton, the renowned physicist, once stuck a sewing needle into his eye socket ''just to see what would happen'' (nothing did). William Buckland, the geologist, was not above serving his dinner guests morsels of mice dipped in batter. Fritz Zwicky, the astronomer who first postulated the existence of supernovas and neutron stars, hated virtually all his colleagues and once threatened to kill his closest collaborator, Walter Baade.

Bryson also manifests a love of the exceptionally large and the infinitesimal, and even after warning us that ''we mustn't swoon over every extraordinary number that comes before us,'' he liberally sprinkles his text with quantities like ''a million million million million (that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles across'' (the size of the universe), and ''0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, or one 10 million trillion trillion trillionths of a second'' (the time after the birth of the universe to which scientific knowledge extends).

The author's account of nearly everything brims with strange and amazing facts. Yellowstone National Park is ''the largest active volcano in the world.'' Chesapeake Bay is an impact crater, formed by the collision of Earth with an asteroid or comet. James Parkinson, after whom Parkinson's disease is named, was ''possibly the only person in history to win a natural history museum in a raffle.''

Bryson might go on for too long about such (to my mind) anesthetizing subjects as trilobites, mosses, lichens, continental drift, plate tectonics, taxonomy and cladistics (don't ask), but these snores are more than offset by his vivid descriptions of natural processes like those that occur inside a living cell: ''If you could visit a cell, you wouldn't like it,'' he says. ''Blown up to a scale at which atoms were about the size of peas, a cell itself would be a sphere roughly half a mile across, and supported by a complex framework of girders called the cytoskeleton. Within it, millions upon millions of objects -- some the size of basketballs, others the size of cars -- would whiz about like bullets. There wouldn't be a place you could stand without being pummeled and ripped thousands of times every second from every direction. Even for its full-time occupants the inside of a cell is a hazardous place. Each strand of DNA is on average attacked or damaged once every 8.4 seconds -- 10,000 times in a day -- by chemicals and other agents that whack into or carelessly slice through it, and each of these wounds must be swiftly stitched up if the cell is not to perish.''

Inevitably, there are some errors. Bryson repeats the oft-made claim that ''there are actually 22 naturally occurring amino acids known on Earth.'' In fact, more than 200 additional amino acids are found in plants. (The 22 amino acids he mentions are those that make up the protein molecules of biological organisms.)

But such lapses are rare, and ''A Short History of Nearly Everything'' seems destined to become a modern classic of science writing.