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Bill Bryson is the author of many bestselling books, including A Walk In the Woods, Notes From a Small Island, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Down Under and Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words. His first encounter with science, in a textbook at school, convinced him the subject was boring – or at best incomprehensible. His interest was rekindled three years ago, and the result is A Short History of Nearly Everything, published in the US this month (Broadway) and in the UK next week (Doubleday). He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, but will shortly be moving to England.

You are known as a travel writer. Did this book feel like a journey?

Originally I thought it would be more of a journey. I thought I was going to have more interaction with scientists. It didn’t end up like that because I wasn’t able to prepare myself well enough. It was almost impossible to talk to these scientists in a way that wasn’t wasting their time. In that sense I failed. But in a more metaphorical sense, certainly it was a journey, because I was starting from a position of exceeding ignorance. It almost was not possible to know less in these fields than I did.

Five hundred pages of popular science, from scratch, is an ambitious project. Why did you do it?

I had this acute feeling – it sort of hit me with a bang – that my whole existence was going to be on this planet. I will never know another world, so I thought at least I should understand how this one works.

But why now?

It may have been partly an outgrowth of my last couple of books. When I did A Walk in the Woods I became interested, for the first time in my life, in natural history. I did quite a lot of reading to understand how mountains were formed and how the ice ages shaped North America. I became more conscious of these long, slow processes that created the world. The same with Down Under: it is impossible to go to Australia and not be aware of just how remarkable this planet is.

Did you find scientific language difficult to penetrate?

I rather expected it to be worse than I found it. I was quite delighted with how accessible most of the writing in Nature is. The part that I sometimes found hard was sitting with a scientist as they explained their work to me. I had one scientist who was extremely patient at explaining particle physics to me, and I simply couldn’t grasp it at all. It seemed like the sort of thing that someone on LSD would be telling you. It is such a completely different world from the one I know.

How did you decide at which level to pitch the book? Who is your audience?

I started out writing it just for myself, and that was pretty easy because I didn’t know any of this stuff. But as I did the research I got to know a lot more than I used to and also more than the person I was aiming the book at. My editor in New York has a science background and he was constantly craving more information and a more sophisticated approach, while my editor in London had, I think, studied humanities, and she was asking for less detail and more explanation. Between them they helped me balance it out.

¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs are often very bad at communicating their work to a lay audience. You have talked to dozens of them over the past three years. How did you find it?

Some of them could only talk about their particular line, and they were so focused that they were essentially of no use to me. Some had trouble talking about broader issues even in their own field. Often they could be quite rusty about the history of their field. For instance, they might tell you that van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to describe a cell when in fact it was Robert Hooke. I was very lucky in that most of the time I found people I approached were very helpful and pleased to have someone taking an interest in what they were doing. And often they were keen to show off. When I was at the Australian National University in Canberra, this geochemist called Victoria Bennett showed me a machine known as Shrimp that is used to date rocks by measuring the decay rate of uranium in zircon. She was so keen to explain everything to me. I didn’t really understand a hundredth of what the people there were saying, but their enthusiasm was completely infectious. Nobody had really asked them about it.

Is there anything that scientists could do better in terms of popularising their work?

Absolutely. If there is a failure in science it is the way scientists neglect to tell people how amazing their work is. I was constantly struck as I was learning by the thought that this is really interesting, why has nobody ever told me about it? If I were a congressman I would give a lot more willingly to research in certain fields if I knew how amazing it was, how interesting it was, and how worthwhile it is to know this stuff. Sometimes scientists are not very good at conveying that. I think they forget about this side of it, or lose the sense of wonder about what they are doing. I suppose if you do something every day for 35 years it starts to seem not quite so astounding. But what a shame to lose that because, almost without exception, the stuff they are doing is astounding.

Did you come across anyone who objected to what you were trying to do?

No, and I didn’t really expect them to. What I did expect was that they would object to me interviewing them, because my career has been largely based on taking the piss out of things. I thought I would have to put in quite a lot of effort persuading people that my motives were virtuous, and that I wasn’t out to make fun of anything they did. But I found people very willing to talk.

You document some fantastic stories about the lives of scientists. Do you think scientists, as a breed, are particularly eccentric?

No, but I think they can get away with eccentricity. It is not a bar to success in science. If you were working for an accountancy firm, you couldn’t really grow your hair like Einstein. One thing that struck me was how often the critical moments in a field were set off by someone from outside that field. For example, the suggestion that dinosaurs became extinct because of something that came from outer space was first made by Walter Alvarez, who had nothing at all to do with palaeontology. Also, it is remarkable how often a thing is named for someone who was the second person to notice it. Life isn’t always fair, but particularly, it seems, to a scientist.

You spent a lot of time researching the history of science and its key players. Are there any you would particularly like to have met?

I would love to have met Isaac Newton but I wouldn’t have known where to begin with him. I’d have been completely lost; it would have been a waste of his time to put me alone with him. He was an extraordinary person. The other person I would love to have met, just to have seen him in the flesh, was Einstein.

You spent a lot of time doing research at institutes and museums. Is there one you are particularly fond of?

Yes, I love the Natural History Museum in London, but much more because of what happens there behind the scenes than out front. From a tourist’s point of view the place is a great disappointment to me compared with what it used to be. I loved it when it was old-fashioned, and personally I think all museums should be determinedly old-fashioned. I want showcases with inert objects sitting there that you can just stare at. Today the museum has a Disney feel to it.

You make the study of science appear very friendly. Is that how you found it?

I had a surprisingly warm and gratifying welcome everywhere I went. Every person I approached was extremely genial. Occasionally I had to work my way through several layers of bureaucracy. For example, when I wanted to spend some time with geologists in the Yellowstone National Park I had to go through the American National Park Service, which is pretty obstructive. It was like trying to get an interview with the director of the CIA. But once I got through that layer and I got to a scientist, they couldn’t have been kinder.

Were there any subjects that you chose not to tackle, or any that you started to tackle and abandoned?

No, but there are lots of things that I wish I’d had more time to study. I ran out of time on the book and there are things I could have done better, both in terms of presentation and in terms of understanding. Some subjects are so big that I never really managed to get into them, such as microbes and infectious diseases. If you had given me another two months I could have really improved that chapter. My biggest regret is that I never really had a chance to step back from the whole thing and think about things and come to a good conclusion about where the world is going. I would have loved to have gone back to the people I spoke to and said, OK this is what I have written, now what do you think the 21st century holds?

Has writing this book changed any of your beliefs, or your feelings about the world and your place in it?

It’s strange that you should touch on that. I would have said that I’m a completely unreligious person. I have no dimensions of spirituality to me at all. But I’m a lot more inclined that way now than I was. I mean, I would be more susceptible to spirituality now than before I started out on this, and I would have expected exactly the opposite to happen. One thing that did strike me is that if you dip into science at any point and follow any line of enquiry back to its origin, you come to a point where God becomes as valid an explanation as anything else – if you go back to the big bang and start asking what caused that or what was going on before that, or what caused life to arise when it did. I don’t necessarily mean the God you go to church to worship, but you eventually arrive at some point where it is completely humbling.