Between the lines

Razor sharp

Mark Miodownik’s fascination with materials science began when, as a young schoolboy in London, he was slashed with a razor blade by a mugger on the tube. As he tells it in his book Stuff Matters, he reacted to the incident by becoming obsessed with steel, peppering his parents with questions such as “Why does a razor blade cut while a paper clip bends?” and “Why don’t spoons taste of anything?”. Miodownik’s obsession soon broadened to include other types of material, and now, as a materials scientist at University College London, he has written a book that will surely fire others with the same enthusiasm. Packed with details about materials from concrete and glass to chocolate and graphite, Stuff Matters is nevertheless an almost effortless read, one that mixes history, personal stories and science with a rare degree of skill. The chapter on paper is a good example. Having begun by describing paper’s physical structure, Miodownik then moves into a poignant discussion of how we use it to preserve memories, before concluding with an amusing rant about how much of the stuff gets flushed down toilets. But what really makes this book stand out is not the high quality of its anecdotes or explanations. Rather, it is the way Miodownik uses them to persuade readers that materials are as much a part of human culture as the arts, technology and literature they make possible. Materials, in a very deep sense, matter.

• 2014 Penguin Press £9.99pb 272pp

Big-Seers and edge-goers

The idea behind this book, which is called The Edge of the Sky, is to explain everything we know about the world using only the ten hundred most used words. This is much harder than it sounds, because a lot of the words that people who study our world (and all that is outside it) like to use are ones that not many people use very much. “Stars” and “Sun” are okay, and so are some harder things like “dark matter” and “red shift”. But to talk about other things, the student-person who wrote this book, Roberto Trotta, has to write words like “student-person” even when he really means something a little bit different. (Also, one time he slips up and uses the word “minute” to mean “very small” even though a nearly same word, meaning a short piece of time, is the one that is really in the ten hundred.) Sometimes his work-around words are funny, like when a person in the book asks herself if maybe she should have been a doctor or “one of those people who wear horse hair on their head and try to trip people up for a living” instead of being a student-person who uses a Big-Seer to look at far-away stars. At other times, the work-around words make The Edge of the Sky sound like a night-time story told by people who lived long ago, and that is kind of pretty. But the book also shows that sometimes, writing about things using only simple words makes them harder to understand, not easier.

• 2014 Basic Books $19.99 144pp

Radiant exaggerations

Early in the opening chapter of his book The Age of Radiance, author Craig Nelson blithely proclaims that “we are now living in the twilight of the atomic age, the end of both nuclear arsenals and nuclear power”. Given that Russia and the US currently have more than 1000 operational strategic warheads each, and nuclear power plants produce more than 10% of global electricity, this statement seems frankly bizarre. But Nelson doesn’t stop there. The rest of the book’s breathless first chapter seems to consist almost entirely of scientific name-checking, pop-culture references and bombastic overstatements, with a few head-scratching factoids (Isaac Newton died of mercury poisoning?) thrown in. After that, one might have expected the book to settle down a bit, and indeed it soon does – but not until after Nelson makes the absurd claim that “nearly every one” of the advances that occurred in the first 50 years of the atomic age “was made, astonishingly enough, by an academic nonentity”. This exaggeration is so wild that Nelson barely bothers to defend it, although he does describe one of these supposed “academic nonentities”, Marie Curie, as “one hell of a broad” and also “tough as cancer”. (Physics World is not sure which of those characterizations is more inappropriate. It will have to think about it.) This is all deeply unfortunate, because in many respects the book is actually rather fun to read. Nelson, a professional journalist, clearly knows how to tell a good story, and his narrative is loaded with choice quotations from the atomic era’s extensive archives. Moreover, the book’s conclusion – essentially, that humankind should use nuclear science responsibly, instead of turning away through “fear, superstition and ignorance” – is one that most physicists will agree with. But only if they make it to the end without hurling the book across the room.

• 2014 Simon and Schuster £19.99/$9.99hb 448pp