POPULAR SCIENCEStuff Matters
Mark Miodownik
Penguin, £18.99
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
In this fascinating little read, master of materials Mark Miodownik takes a snapshot of his home and begins picking apart the substances that make our world.
REVIEW
Nature makes materials. Some are fine as they are (carbon is the Lego of the materials world, constructing a dazzling array of stuff from diamonds to pencil lead). Some require some tinkering and refinement that comes either with forethought or happenstance to enslave them to our mundane purposes.
We put the results to the most obvious use available at their time. But their properties often have far-reaching and unintended consequences down the line and that's when the blistering alchemy happens.
Glass, for example, changed the Romans' appreciation of wine so, centuries later, the West could make microscopes and telescopes and leave the technologically more advanced Chinese behind in the natural sciences. (The Chinese developed the remarkable porcelain for their drinking vessels instead).
Wonder material aerogel, 98.8% air, ended the first chapter of its ignominious life as a thickening agent in screw-worm salves for sheep. Only when Nasa recognised it was the finest thermal insulator did it reach the space age, the Space Shuttle and ultimately form the diaphanous net that captures space dust.
Professor of Materials and Society at USL Mark Miodownik, author of this fascinating book, puts people at the heart of his tale, either as tinker, thinker or beneficiary.
He reflects on the efficacy of the razor blade that slashed his back as a boy. He watches the Shard grow near his home (Calcium silicate hydrate fibrils traps water and grows almost organically enveloping itself and other rocks and stones. The result is concrete, the most disregarded yet remarkable of the construction materials.) He pens his thoughts on bleached delignified wood pulp.
From these everyday simplicities, Miodownik surveys the golden age of materials where we can fully explore the atomic and quantum properties of materials that we shape and then, consequently, shape us.
(When you bend a paperclip, 100,000,000,000,000 of atoms shift from one side of the crystal to the other at the speed of light. If they didn't the paperclip would break.)
As has often been said, understanding more about the stuff around us increases - not diminishes - their wonder and Miodownik imbues this whistle-stop tour with infectious enthusiasm, plenty of quotable facts and a lingering sense that we've been taking our domestic comforts for granted.
A cup of tea and a square of Dairy Milk can never again be regarded as simple pleasures.
