o1mnikent

This is Shelly on the phone telling people she’s engaged. To me, of course.

Time named me their Person of the Year for 2006, thrusting me into the ranks of Winston Churchhill, Joseph Stalin, and the president of Amazon.com. They did this to recognize the arrival of Web 2.0, characterized by blogs, YouTube, wikipedia, podcasting, and social networking sites such as myspace and facebook. (An aside: I just set up a facebook account, and I have an embarrassingly small number of friends. We can all work together to make sure that my online persona is not lame.) They’ve named groups of people before as the POTY; in the sixties, both young people and women were named POTY, giving young women the rare honor of being named POTY twice.

But this year is different. The website tells me to

“…look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

Included in the group of people who has not changed the world this year – i.e. not ME – are the ad executives at time.com and Chrysler. When I click on the POTY website from Time.com’s homepage, I’m redirected to a Chrysler ad that begins thus: “You may not be the person of the year, but you can drive like one.” This ad fails to recognize that I, like every one of its other viewers, am the person of the year. The protasis of this ad takes no account of my ability to befriend fellow facebookers (hypothetically), or post comments on time.com’s blog, or post the videos on YouTube or Google Video of Dave digging into our Christmas tree, looking for the keys that he threw in there. But that’s why I am the person of the year, and Chrysler is not.

Fellow POTYer Bill Langworthy’s acceptance speech on yesterday’s All Things Considered sums up my sentiments.

Nathan recently referred me to a blog called “Blogging the Bible” by David Plotz and hosted by Slate. David is reading the Bible for the first time and commenting on it. His comments are free from any historical and theological interpretive baggage, for better or worse. Either way, it’s worth a read.

Those who know me, and others who have heard, know that I tend to speak in superlatives. I’ve almost always just seen the “best movie ever”, eaten “the best pasta ever”, heard the “best sermon ever”, heard the “best song ever”, or what have you. For this and other reasons, my judgment usually can’t be trusted, because it’s inevitable that I’ll soon eat the next most paradigm-shifting, life-altering, best hot dog ever.

For me, the mark of a good book is whether or not it can maintain its superlative status for several months after I’ve read it. A Short History of Nearly Everything is such a book. I first encountered this book this past June while I was staying the night at my aunt and uncle’s apartment during their sabbatical at Regent College. I had an early morning flight out of Vancouver, so it made sense to spend the night there instead of making the drive from Lynden early the next morning. As I was falling asleep, I grabbed at random a book off their shelf and began to read from somewhere near the middle of the book, beginning with a chapter called “The Mysterious Biped.” I read until I couldn’t stay awake any longer, and vowed to find it the next morning in the airport.

The next morning came, and we headed to the airport. On the way, I saw the most beautiful sunrise EVER. At the airport, I checked in early and swiftly cleared immigration before beginning my intense hunt for a bookstore. I found one, but it didn’t have Bill Bryson’s book. I opted instead for The Life of Pi (another excellent book) and made my way to the plane, where I sat next to a guy who read A Short History of Nearly Everything the whole way to Minneapolis. For that reason and others, we didn’t get along. When our plane landed in Minneapolis and I had deplaned, I found a bookstore (you know the one – by the tram, near the B concourse) and purchased Bryson’s book before catching my flight to Grand Rapids. I devoured the book during the following days.

Bryson’s goal is ambitious. In the introduction, Byrson recalls a trans-Pacific flight, when he looked at the ocean below and wondered why the Pacific is salty, yet the Great Lakes are not. This, Bryson says, “represented only the merest sliver of my ignorance,” so he begins a series of extensive travels and a few years of reading to learn more about the world we inhabit.

The book deals with things great – like the size of the universe, the solar system, the age of the earth, continental drift – and small – like quarks, atoms, cells, and microbacteria. He writes about obscure geologists who made many of their discoveries while sitting in awkward positions across the arms of chairs (not to be confused with nineteenth century armchair-scientists, which Bryson also writes about). He writes of scientists who did experiments on themselves (“What’s this? Hey! I think I just discovered radioactivity!” Etc.) and their kin, including angry wives and soon-to-be-deformed children.

Bryson’s prose, as always, is beautifully crafted. It is witty, intelligent, and often funny. Few people can write about ice ages in a way that makes me laugh to tears. One chapter begins thus:

“Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, a compound that has no taste or smell and is so variable in its properties that it is generally benign but at other times swiftly lethal. Depending on its state, it can scald you or freeze you. In the presence of certain organic molecules it can form carbonic acids so nasty that they can strip the leaves from trees and eat the faces off statuary. In bulk, when agitated, it can strike with a fury that no human edifice could withstand. Even for those who have learned to live with it, it is an often murderous substance. We call it water.”

A few themes emerge throughout the book. For one, we see that some of the most significant discoveries of the past five hundred years were usually stumbled upon by accident and then universally rejected by most of the scientific community for decades or centuries. Newton, for example, accidentally invented calculus and then didn’t tell anyone for several years. Einstein’s conceived of his theory of relativity as a janitor in a laboratory. Darwin (a pastor, incidentally) developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection, but didn’t publish it for twenty years out of fear that people would hate him, which as it turns out, they did. And still do. The missing link in Darwin’s theory until the early twentieth century was that of genetics, which had been invented by Mendel several decades prior, unbeknownst to anyone in the scientific community.

Most of all, Bryson’s book reveals the marvelous complexity of the universe, and prompts a sheer amazement of our existence in it. He writes in the final chapter,

“We have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. […] If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to here—and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly luck, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.”

Indeed, Bryson’s book is a good first step at grasping that talent. A great read for the non-scientist, this book is an introduction to a world that our theology verifies, a kind of Psalm 8 in bulk. It’s great summer reading, in-between classes reading, or plane reading.

(I’d also recommend two other best books ever by Bryson that I’ve read since: The Mother Tongue, which documents the history and development of modern English, and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bryson’s reflections on growing up in the fifties in mid-America.)