A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING By Bill Bryson. 544 pp. DoubleDay Canada $39.95 (Hardcover) I haven’t sat and watched this much television is years. But, it’s hard not to when the birth of the universe is on. And on my television, which gets only one channel with rabbit ears, it’s on every night. So, as Bill Bryson puts it in A Short History of Nearly Everything: “The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.” What Bryson is referring to, in such an illuminating and funny way,…