《万物简史》是美国作家 Bill Bryson 所著的一本通俗科学读物，用通俗易懂的语言解释了一些专业科学领域问题。本书是英国2005年畅销科普书籍之一，销量超过30万册。
作者自述写作本书是由于他对自己的科学知识贮备不满意。
本书不同于作者的其他游记作品，而是描述一般科学领域的话题，如化学，古生物学，天文学和粒子物理学，尤其是通过进化学和地质学探索了从宇宙大爆炸到发现量子力学的历程。
作者用图解的方式描述了宇宙的大小以及原子和亚原子粒子的大小，探索了地质学和生物学的历史，追溯生命的诞生到今天现代人类的发展，尤其是现代智人的发展。
作者讨论了一些破坏性的灾害在地球的起源及其历史，例如地震、火山、海啸、飓风，以及这些灾难所引起的大规模灭绝等自然灾害的严重程度，谈到了关于人类对地球气候和其他物种生存的影响的现代科学观点。
2005年本书获得了欧盟笛卡尔科学传播奖。
本书还讲述了有关科学研究和发现背后的科学家的幽默故事。
2004年本书赢得了著名的Avests奖的最佳普通科学书奖项。作者后来捐赠了1万英镑的奖金给奥蒙德街医院儿童慈善事业。
下面摘自Wikipedia有关作者的介绍：
William McGuire "Bill" Bryson，1951年12月8日出生，美国作家。毕业于Iowa 的 Drake 大学，曾任职于英国伦敦泰晤士报与独立报，也曾为纽约时报、君子杂志、GQ杂志撰文，以笔调幽默的游记闻名，同时也出版了许多语言学与科学书籍。
我用Kindle读的这本书，作了一些摘抄，见下：
Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.
Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way—estimates range from 100 billion or so to perhaps 400 billion—and the Milky Way is just one of 140 billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours.
Just reaching the center of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as beings.
Halley was an exceptional figure. In the course of a long and productive career, he was a sea captain, a cartographer, a professor of geometry at the University of Oxford, deputy controller of the Royal Mint, astronomer royal, and inventor of the deep-sea diving bell. He wrote authoritatively on magnetism, tides, and the motions of the planets, and fondly on the effects of opium. He invented the weather map and actuarial table, proposed methods for working out the age of the Earth and its distance from the Sun, even devised a practical method for keeping fish fresh out of season. The one thing he didn't do, interestingly enough, was discover the comet that bears his name. He merely recognized that the comet he saw in 1682 was the same one that had been seen by others in 1456, 1531, and 1607. It didn't become Halley's comet until 1758, some sixteen years after his death.
It was the first really universal law of nature ever propounded by a human mind, which is why Newton is regarded with such universal esteem.
Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
Nowadays, and speaking very generally, geological time is divided first into four great chunks known as eras: Precambrian, Paleozoic (from the Greek meaning “old life”), Mesozoic (“middle life”), and Cenozoic (“recent life”).
God had wiped out creatures not occasionally but repeatedly. This made Him seem not so much careless as peculiarly hostile.
It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of paleontology than Mary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close. His name was Gideon Algernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex.
In 1955, element 101 was named mendelevium in his honor. “Appropriately,” notes Paul Strathern, “it is an unstable element.”
The Michelson-Morley outcome became, in the words of William H. Cropper, “probably the most famous negative result in the history of physics.” Michelson was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics for the work—the first American so honored—but not for twenty years.
We were about to enter the quantum age, and the first person to push on the door was the so-far unfortunate Max Planck.
When a journalist asked the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington if it was true that he was one of only three people in the world who could understand Einstein's relativity theories, Eddington considered deeply for a moment and replied: “I am trying to think who the third person is.”
“All science is either physics or stamp collecting,”
There is a certain engaging irony therefore that when he won the Nobel Prize in 1908, it was in chemistry, not physics.
As Cropper has put it, if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be only about the size of a fly—but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral.
Carl Sagan in Cosmos raised the possibility that if you traveled downward into an electron, you might find that it contained a universe of its own.
Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England. One corner of Staten Island, but only a corner, is European.
A great deal of sickness arises not because of what the organism has done to you but what your body is trying to do to the organism.
Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, “and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.”
“Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history.”
Ironically, considering that Darwin called his book On the Origin of Species, the one thing he couldn't explain was how species originated.
Genes are nothing more (nor less) than instructions to make proteins.
An alternative and more common way to regard the genome is as a kind of instruction manual for the body.
Altogether, almost half of human genes—the largest proportion yet found in any organism—don't do anything at all, as far as we can tell, except reproduce themselves.
Interestingly, the amount of genetic material and how it is organized doesn't necessarily, or even generally, reflect the level of sophistication of the creature that contains it.
It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.
all of these evolutionary jostlings over five million years, from distant, puzzled australopithecine to fully modern human, produced a creature that is still 98.4 percent genetically indistinguishable from the modern chimpanzee.
Nobody can even quite agree where truly modern humans first appear in the fossil record.
Modern human beings show remarkably little genetic variability—“there's more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps than in the entire human population,”
Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history.
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