Finished

A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING

If the section on biology is anything to go by, the book has some concepts grossly simplified but is, overall, surprisingly accurate in a layman's description of...well, nearly everything.

It's not an easy thing to do. I'm fairly impressed, given that the book covers cosmology, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, oceanography, paleontology, archeology, and meteorology (which is not counting the things that the tangents touched on briefly). Not something you read to get in depth knowledge in any one field, maybe, and not even a book you'd read as an introduction to a field, but a very good summary of the development of science that is relatively broad and fairly easy to read.

It's like reading an abstract on Science. Not something I'd read a second time but then, unless you didn't take notes on your article properly and need to reference it later, you wouldn't read an abstract a second time anyway.

Worthwhile to read the first time? Yes.

Note

Finally got to the biology portion. It's near the end, but in a way that makes since, since biology is a fairly recent branch of science (and so much of it is delicate and depends on technological developments). ...which isn't what brought me to posting here, actually. I am posting because I read the comparison that DNA and RNA are like Spanish and Hindi. They aren't really. Their chemical properties are a lot more similar than that (heh, otherwise a bunch of the stuff I did in the lab shouldn't have worked). It's more like, say, Spanish and French. Both are romance languages derived from Latin, both share many grammatical rules and verb tenses, but the conjugations, pronounciation and spellings are often very different and even if you've never heard either language before in your life (in which case I suppose "you" might be analogous to a newly made protein), you'll still be able to tell, the first time you hear the two languages, that they are two distinctly different languages.

Definitely more similar than Hindi and Spanish, though.

Currently on page 400.