How accurate is Bill Bryson's book "A Short History of Nearly Everything"?

[DrDeth]

@Novelty_Bobble

but the “thicker at the bottom” window stuff has always been known as an urban myth, seeing as the original glaziers knew exactly why the panes of glass were manufactured in that way and why they put the thicker end at the bottom.

Can you find it disproved on a cite before 2003?

I am sure the original glaziers knew that, but did they put it in a book?

[furryman]

@samclem

I can’t speak to that book, but his books dealing with word/phrase origins are full of inaccuracies. I think he writes an interesting book first, an accurate one second.

That’s a shame. That book is one of the most interesting books about word origins I’ve ever read.

[samclem]

@furryman

That’s a shame. That book is one of the most interesting books about word origins I’ve ever read.

As I said, interesting, not always accurate.

[Novelty_Bobble]

@DrDeth

Can you find it disproved on a cite before 2003?

I am sure the original glaziers knew that, but did they put it in a book?

When discussing it during a physics lesson on materials in the early 80’s our teacher asked us to consider this fact and come up with reasons why it might be. I didn’t know about the “flowing” myth but did know of the older methods of creating panes of glass (spun glass with the “bullseyes” etc) So that was my own fairly rational explanation. They put the heavier and thicker glass section at the bottom because the thinner section was more fragile.
This was all as an intro by the teacher into why the myth was just that, and that glass didn’t flow measurably in windows but that it was a curious material and behaved in strange ways (we also discussed the pitch drop experiment)

So certainly it was being taught to me as fact in the early 80’s and would be known to to the early glaziers hundreds of years ago and anyone renovating old buildings and windows from that time onwards.
Here’s a citefrom before the year 2000 which talks about it as if it were already understood to be a myth but gets disproved anyway.

[naita]

@NigelIncubatorJones

“…Bryson compares the size of Pluto to the size of the Earth. On page 22 he says that if you set Pluto down on top of the United States it would cover not quite half of the lower 48 states. But, on page 24 he says that if the Earth were the size of a pea, that Pluto would be about the size of a bacterium…”

I thought the same exact thing. Science by definition is largely non-factual – if it weren’t it would be religion. Or, to paraphrase Kant, all models are wrong but some are useful. What I believe BB meant is Pluto would appear to be the size of a bacterium if you and the distance between the two solar objects were proportionally shrunk. In any case, you can forgive his factual transgressions – it’s infotainment, and no more so than CNN or NPR. Some of the errors surfaced over time as well. He mentions no virus has more than 10 genes, but since the book was published, organisms such as Pandoravirus have been found to possess a couple thousand genes. Suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride.

Welcome to the Straight Dope! If you read the banner carefully you’ll see that we’re all about fighting ignorance here, so telling people to “Suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride” when talking about information presented as fact is likely to fall on deaf ears. Also note that this thread is more than 10 years old.