I’m currently reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I’m just over a hundred or so pages into it and we have reached the discovery of the Dinosaurs. It’s an excellent book, written in Bryson’s trademark prose – humorous, digestible, and impeccably structured.
I never thought I would enjoy a book that is primarily about physics and its curious history, but it’s an excellent summary of the universe in which we all share.
What is rather interesting is the level of scientific discoveries made by Brits throughout the last few centuries. While men of the Enlightenment indeed frequented North American and France, it was Imperial Britain, which led the way.
One could transplant this dominance of science to the modern world and the technological dominance of the US. The arrival of the America as a superpower coincided with an increase in their scientific prowess. Equally British scientific influence in the world diminished with its Empire (although the UK remains a world leader, it has nowhere near its former grandeur). It is no surprise that scientific progress correlates directly with economic superiority; however what should not be ignored is the pace at which Asian nations (notably China, Korea, India) are challenging American scientific primacy.
If Bible belt America continues to garner political power, and conservative anti-constitutionalists get their way, science in America may suffer further. The wave of support enjoyed by the theory of Intelligent Design, which supposes the world is just too complex to be coincidental, is in direct conflict with scientific reason. ID suggests that the world is little over a few thousand years and dinosaurs and man once co-habited the Earth. There is nothing really to add to this supposition other than the much-loved, but sadly over-used term…bollocks.
So if indeed America is to face down the technological march of the emerging hyper-economies of Asia, it would do well to issue every school child as copy of Bryson’s cracking tome.
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