This book rocks! Bill Bryson “A Short History of Nearly everything“, science couldn’t be more fun to learn. I’ve read some of the chapters (they are pretty independent chapters, thus you could skipping around to read them), and I could hardly put it down (except in the office tho). For example, do you know that the dawn of a new age in science came in 1905 when there appeared a series of paper by a swiss young bureaucrat who had no affiliation to university, to lab, with regular access to only library of national patent office in Bern as technical examiner third class? His paper called “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” has no footnotes, citations, maths, no mention of any works that preceeded it (read the original version). His name? Einstein. Boy! You won’t get this sort of description in any text book.
It’s worth reading book. And maybe if I remember one or two of them, I’d have more interesting stories to be told 