Celebrated author Bill Bryson presents a lecture on the history of science in the Great Hall at the Guildhall in honor of the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society.

His book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, won the Aventis Prize for Science Books in 2004 and was awarded the Descartes Science Communication Prize in 2005.

From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields.

His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably.