Bill Bryson: ‘I had this infinite capacity to be amazed by everything’

Saturday, 15 November 2025

**Bill Bryson is worried about science and America. In an interview ahead of two New Zealand live shows early next year, he talks to André Chumko about humanity’s innate curiosity, *why he never could’ve been a real researcher,* and the unsolved mysteries that keep him up at night.**

Legendary American-British journalist and author Bill Bryson, who has written 21 non-fiction books on topics including travel, history, language and science, has missed cocktail hour and, it seems, many of his other scheduled interviews – but not mine.

Via video link from his home in the United Kingdom’s Hampshire county, Bryson, 73, whose legs are stiff and who has a big smile even though it’s late, tells Your Weekend that he usually would’ve had a drink two hours ago. But, so he’s lucid and literate for his interviewers, he instead is nursing a non-alcoholic beer.

“It’s always a pleasure to be back in New Zealand,” the Iowa-born writer says, ahead of his two-stop tour of the country in February. With audiences in Wellington and Auckland, (plus in Singapore and Australia), Bryson will share the major advances of science he traverses in a complete rewrite of the biggest-selling popular science book of the 21st century, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003).

Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0, published this year, explores the Big Bang through to the rise of civilisation: from the discovery of quantum mechanics to cosmology, evolution, geology and particle physics – and that’s just for starters.

He also delves into the lives of the scientists behind the research, highlighting their sometimes eccentric behaviours, and talks about his experiences travelling the world for his many travelogues.

“I’m very, very excited,” he says. “My wife [Cynthia Billen] is coming with me and they’re giving us some time off after I’ve done the two events, and we’re going to have a few days in New Zealand just touring around … I would really like to take her to the Bay of Islands. I was there the last time I was in New Zealand, I thought it was lovely.”

The art of science communication

With such vast subject material, Bryson says it’s hard to wrap his brain around almost everything he writes about. “I couldn’t be a scientist. I don’t have the aptitude for it and I don’t have the patience for it. Scientists have to be very, very diligent and able to stick with one very specific thing for long periods,” he says.

“My engagement with science is very much at a superficial level. But I think there’s a real value in that. Because the one advantage I had over people who were proper scientists … is that I had this infinite capacity to be amazed by everything I heard. And even though I don’t understand it in any detail, the basic concept is enough.”

He knows he won’t teach people how to be physicists or chemists.

“But what I am going to do is hope that I can persuade you that science is really important to all of us in terms of our existence, and that it can be very, very fulfilling if you pay attention to it.”

Writing about nearly everything, even if the title is slightly ironic, worked in the author’s favour, as he only had enough room for a breathless sprint through each subject – this helped avoid paralysis induced by its expansiveness.

There are still many scientific mysteries that keep Bryson’s mind up at night, for instance what dark matter really is, how the Indigenous Aboriginal people travelled across giant oceans to Australia about 50,000 years ago, or how the now-extinct homo floresiensis species of small archaic humans came to be on the island of Flores, Indonesia, before the arrival of modern humans.

It is somewhat astounding, almost humorous, he says, that even the world’s most intelligent cosmologists don’t know what most of the universe is made up of.

But since the honorary fellow of the Royal Society set about completely rewriting A Short History, originally published in a time before the internet was everywhere, he admits that if some of the mysteries were ever solved, it might not be so great for his books.

“It’d be great for the world; it’d be great for knowledge,” Bryson laughs.

Looking at images of scientists like Albert Einstein, with their shock-grey hair, it is easy to understand where the eccentric, obsessive stereotype of the mad professor has its root.

Bryson says there probably is a link between genius and eccentricity, but his highlighting the quirks of the people behind the world’s greatest discoveries (Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin) was also something he was always deliberately looking for, because, he says, it makes the story more interesting.

“Most of what scientists do is really dull. They just sit looking at computer screens all day or, even if they go out in the field, you don’t want to follow an archaeologist around all day, because they’re just digging around in dirt. It’s not fun to watch … Having said that, I do think that actually a scientist, probably more than the average person, does tend to be a little bit on the eccentric side.”

It was important for him to weave humour and the comic angle in to his science books to make them enjoyable, not dry or textbook-like. “Even in serious matters, there’s usually an element of absurdity in there somewhere.”

Travel musings

For his science writing, Bryson meticulously researches, taking boxes of notes.

While these were all handwritten previously, in recent years he’s been reluctantly making the shift to digital – “I think partly because I’m a 20th century person. I’m used to physical pieces of paper”.

Proudly born in Des Moines, the capital city of the American state of Iowa, in December 1951, to a pair of journalists and writers who worked at provincial newspaper The Des Moines Register, Bryson has been a resident of Britain for most of his adult life.

He’s been based in Britain permanently since 2003, but also lived there from the late 1970s for a period of about two decades, before spending eight years in the US across the late 90s and early 2000s. He holds dual citizenship to both countries, and has four children with Billen.

He says his parents being journalists made him also want to be one.

His many travel books explore his intrepid adventures across the US, the UK and Australia, plus his experiences growing up in Iowa. Those books, he says, are a totally different process to his science ones.

“I’m mostly doing it from memory. My conviction is that you’ll have this experience, you go away on a holiday and you’re sort of bombarded with experiences. You had the most amazing time, and then you come back and six weeks later you’ve forgotten three quarters of it. But I believe the quarter that you remember, or whatever portion you remember, that’s the important stuff and that’s the stuff that I then put in a book,” he says.

Bryson sometimes avoids writing about particular locations because he feels he’s too much of an outsider to make any astute, non-tedious insights into the culture, for instance Japan.

But increasingly, he’s also feeling like a foreigner in his native country.

“We can go into the whole political thing, but I don’t think I really need to explain to anybody why what’s going on in America at the moment would make anybody who’s lived away from it for a long time feel like they just don’t recognise the place any more. It’s really sad.

“And it’s not just the politics. I mean, the culture has changed … I just feel disconnected from things there increasingly.”

Bryson says he grew up in an America that’s completely different from what it’s now become.

“My parents, we were Democrats, and Dwight Eisenhower was elected as president. He was a Republican. They didn’t want him to be elected president, but they still respected him.

“They didn’t treat him as Satan, because he wasn’t from the right political party for them … But now, anybody who’s on the other end of the political spectrum, they’re demonised and hated, absolutely detested in a way that you just think these two sides are never going to get back together again or find any kind of common ground.

“I think that’s a real tragedy, and a very great worry for America.”

Bryson says it’s scandalous what’s happening to science in America, with evidence and facts under fire and being discredited.

Ongoing funding cuts to universities and research institutes were also “serious and heartbreaking”.

The internet, which is beneficial in many ways because of its access to information, has also become dangerous for its ability to spread unverified theories, he says.

“People are being encouraged to believe dangerously wrong, misleading things about vaccines and measles, and I’m sure you’ve seen you’re not supposed to take paracetamol any more in America … It’s just insane … You have to hope that this is just a four-year fluke, and somehow America will get back on the right course.”

A curious life

Bryson says his life is great these days.

He’s been happily retired since 2020, but this tour momentarily brings him out of that. He says the last working thing he wanted to was to bring his A Short History book up to date, which is done now.

Once it’s all over he’ll go back to spending days with his 12 grandchildren and his big garden. Billen is a floral person, while he mostly just rakes a lot and moves dirt and other things around in wheelbarrows.

“I like to do the heavy, mindless stuff. I listen to podcasts a lot while I’m gardening. [I love] being out in the fresh air, doing mindless stuff, doing good exercise, but not having to think about things. And listening to podcasts; occasionally listening to music, too. I find that very refreshing. Even in an English climate.”

Bryson says humans, by nature of our species, are all curious.

He loves coming into things as a non-expert, prepared to be amazed by what he learns – it’s part of the reason he’s attracted to science.

But it still surprises him just how much humans don’t know.

“We have absolutely virtually no idea what’s out there. You could be walking around with hundreds of unknown specimens of microorganisms on your shoes, one of which might cure cancer or chlamydia … In a way, I think that’s wonderful.”

Book: The Best of Bill Bryson - Live on Stage, February 10, Wellington’s Opera House, February 12, Auckland’s Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre. Tickets: lateralevents.com****