Altitis

I’m traveling this week. This used to be completely unremarkable only  a couple of months ago, as I spent about half of my time abroad training colleagues.

But in the latest economy-is-down-let’s-reinvent-ourselves, my role has changed, and heck, training has changed a lot too. Among things done differently is shifting much of our training from classroom-based to online.

That concretely means two things. I normally no longer travel around, and several hundred of our colleagues now have to put up with my funny accent over a phone line while watching a slide deck instead of having to deal with my antics on a whiteboard and flipchart.

Of course, they get some advantages out of that, the first thing, I’m actually not really good looking so they can concentrate on what’s on their screen, the second thing, they are actually shielded from my endless questions (I used to be a firm practitioner of the socratic method of transferring knowledge through questioning), and last, they probably are checking their e-mails and doing their normal daily jobs during most of the conference calls we’re holding.

I suspect it’s also less enjoyable, but heck, it’s work, we’re all here to make money, for having a good time, the after-work-drink-bar is thataway. And after all, the tenants also need to make a living, so relieving you of your hard-earned money right after you’re done earning it is, at the very least, both convenient and efficient.

But this week I’m back in Ireland to go through a training myself (which was pretty interesting BTW), and when I’m flying I’m usually reading.

For this trip, I picked up “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by a fellow called Bill Bryson. The book itself is a bit of an oddity, because Bryson pretty much built his reputation on writing travel stories – as an American expatriate to the UK for a longer part of his life, he got around, and he has a very engaging, and humorous way, of recounting his adventures and discoveries in the wide, vast world. I first was introduced to Bryson’s “Neither Here nor There” account of a youthful trip across continental Europe by a British acquaintance who was himself following in Bryson’s footsteps and had stranded in Geneva on a miserably rainy Sunday where pretty much everything was either closed or soaking wet.

”A Short History” is not exactly your standard travel book. As he recounts in the preface, Bryson was traveling by plane earlier this decade and suddenly realized that while he had visited plenty of amazing places, he knew (in his eyes) remarkably little of how our planet works. He therefore spent the next couple of years pestering scientists in countless fields to find out, and “A Short History of Nearly Everything” is the result of his relentless inquiries.

Before you get the wrong impression, it’s not a science textbook, rather, an amazingly entertaining and well written history of science. Written in an accessible prose and a wit I could only dream of possessing, the key figures in all of the major scientific fields of the past half millennium come back to life as the actors of a fascinating tale of how we went from believing completely wrong things to knowing that we were ignorant of much (but at least having dispelled certain of the now more scurrilous-sounding myths like Earth being only 7 millenia old or so in the process, probably a net benefit in the grand scheme of things).

It is also a constantly renewed exposure of the endless tragedy of the true discoverers of much we now take for granted. Indeed, by painting all of these countless portraits, Bryson makes it abundantly clear that if you’re really the first genius to make a revolutionary discovery, you are most likely to be rhetorically challenged, end up broke, divorced and alone, die and remain forever unnoticed by the rest of the world (unless you become the victim of backstabbing and deceit, which is also a very frequent occurence) and your contributions to the advancement of human knowledge attributed to someone who is by necessity less brilliant than you, came to the same conclusions as you did several decades after you, stole your ideas and never credited you for it, or was able to turn whatever you had written in a way so obscure and unintelligible (remember, rhetorically challenged is a common trait among geniuses) that nobody understood it into concepts so clear and simple that nobody would believe it was actually just a reformulation of your original ideas.

Unless you’re Albert Einstein, of course. Still, even when discussing those rare scientists, inventors or discoverers who managed to combine inventiveness with originality and dodge the bullet of ruin and misery, Bryson will be quick to remind you of their humanity, exposing, to the reader’s utter delight, various character flaws marking them as utter jerks, or, just for fun, rubbing in the one most glaring mistake they made in their life.

Under his artful pen, the history of science unfolds as a joyous and deeply enjoyable gallery of portraits that explains what we know today and how we found out. Fascinating and at times so hilarious that people sitting across the aisle start looking at you funny wondering why you’re laughing out loud at cruising speed and 10′000 meters of altitude, I just cannot recommend “A Short History of Nearly Everything” enough.

But whether you’re a nerd, a geek, or just a normal person, this is a highly recommended read, if only for passing the time of the next server maintenance. The only danger ahead is that you may actually miss the moment the servers come back online, and keep reading, and reading, and reading.

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