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The award-winning writer Bill Bryson tells Roger Highfield why his fascination with our place in the universe led him to revisit his least favourite subject at school

Your parents were journalists. Is that why you went into the profession?

I grew up in Iowa; both my parents wrote for The Des Moines Register, which is probably the best provincial paper in the US. It won a lot of Pulitzer prizes. Newspapers were the family business; that is what you did in my house. It never occurred to me to do anything else. When I went into journalism in the UK, I didn鈥檛 work as a writer but as a subeditor on the production side. It was good training to become a writer.

Your travel writings are famous for focusing on eccentric detail, yet in A Short History of Nearly Everything you look down the other end of the telescope at grander ideas. Why did you decide to make that transition?

I never intended to be a travel writer. My first successful book was The Lost Continent, which described a trip back to America when I travelled around the country in my mother鈥檚 old Chevrolet and noticed how it had changed. It did fairly well, so I came under pressure to keep doing the same thing. I imagine that鈥檚 why Peter Mayle followed A Year in Provence with Toujours Provence and Encore Provence. After I鈥檇 written a few travel books, I thought: I can鈥檛 keep mining this vein of humour; I cannot write another joke about disappointing landladies and bad meals. So I decided to write a book about trying to understand science, specifically about understanding our place in the universe.

It鈥檚 a big change. Were you worried, given that you would be writing about scientists instead of landladies?

I was very nervous about moving into writing about science as it was so far out of my comfort zone. Plus, I had this reputation for taking the mickey out of things and being irreverent, so I didn鈥檛 know how scientists would perceive me 鈥� whether they would think I was just out to make fun of them. I would have been very reluctant to be interviewed by me if I had been in their position. But when they saw that I was genuinely curious to understand what they were doing, the amount of help they gave me was tremendous. It was quite moving in a lot of ways because for many of them, particularly in a specialised field, it had been a long time since anybody had taken a real interest in what they were doing or how they ended up doing it. You could see them light up when they talked about their research.

How did you get the idea for the book?

I was looking out of an aeroplane window on a flight across the Pacific Ocean and it struck me forcefully 鈥� this is the only planet I am ever going to live on and I didn鈥檛 know a thing about it.

Do you think this is because curiosity in science is stamped out in school?

Science classes are almost always taught, in my experience, as if they are trying to produce the next generation of scientists. Of course, that is a vital function. But there is no recognition that a very large proportion of people are not going to become scientists.

What always disappointed me about science lessons was how the teacher would, almost as soon as they got through the door, turn around and start writing equations on the blackboard. This meant I was quickly out of my depth; I don鈥檛 have a brain that is comfortable dealing with mathematics and algebra.

In fact, there is nothing in science that isn鈥檛 worth being excited about. Unfortunately, the place you are least likely to find excitement, in my view, is in schools, when that is the precise place you should be handing it out to people.

鈥淭here is nothing in science that isn鈥檛 worth being excited about鈥�

Tell me about the book you have just edited, Seeing Further.

This book is written by special people for a special audience. It has a huge number of writers 鈥� such as Margaret Atwood, who writes about the madness of mad scientists, and Steve Jones, whose contribution is on evolution and biodiversity 鈥� all people of great distinction. Describing me as an editor gives me far too much credit; I offered a few thoughts about how it should be. I am a distant uncle to the book. I don鈥檛 have to be falsely modest. A lot of people worked very hard to make something that鈥檚 going to be really terrific.

Whose contribution have you enjoyed the most?

Of course, I would not answer a question like that, with the exception of the contribution of Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society. They are all terrific.

Does science, being highly mathematical, deserve special care and treatment in books?

On the one hand, you don鈥檛 want to make science literature too populist. It needs to be a quality presentation. But it should be enjoyed by a wider audience than just Royal Society fellows and members of the science community. How you get the balance right takes a bit of thought.

Given your experience, what is the one thing writers need to do to connect with a general audience?

The greatest danger is that you forget what amazed and excited you about your field. I was talking to a particle scientist after I had read about how electrons can go from one orbit to another without travelling across the space in between. I said, 鈥淚sn鈥檛 that amazing?鈥�, and he replied, 鈥淎nything that happens in the quantum world is amazing.鈥� In fact, everything that happens anywhere is amazing if you stop and consider it.

Does writing about science make you cheerful because scientists are good at solving problems, or gloomy because there are problems you might not have known about?

Both. I was completely bowled over again and again by the genius of human beings and the things that scientists have figured out. Newton and Einstein were truly amazing human beings. But what really got me was the realisation that science is an aggregation of much smaller efforts and breakthrough moments. It is a conglomeration of little bits of knowledge that add up to something that is often magnificent. But then there are all the bad things we as a species continue to do, such as making animals go extinct. Why can we not grasp that there is just one planet that is habitable and we cannot afford to screw it up? We are so inept.

Tell me about your next book.

It鈥檚 called At Home: An informal history of private life. I promised my wife I鈥檇 write a book where I didn鈥檛 have to leave home. We live in a rectory that was built in 1851 and in the book I explore how the rooms have been lived in throughout history. The bathroom illustrates the history of hygiene; the living room, the history of comfort; and the bedroom, sex, death and sleeping. Whatever happens in the world eventually comes to your house.