By Margaret Harris
Materials scientist and first-time popular-science author Mark Miodownik was all smiles last night as his book Stuff Matters scooped one of the UK’s top non-fiction awards, the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. The book, an engaging and often highly personal look at some of the everyday materials that make modern civilization possible, was the unanimous choice of the five-member judging panel, coming top in a strong shortlist that also included a history of general relativity, a memoir about cancer and an analysis of the role played by physicists in Nazi Germany.
Miodownik picked up his award – a rectangular prism that looked like glass but was, he informed us, actually made of acrylic – at the end of a ceremony in which he and four of the other shortlisted authors appeared on stage at the Royal Society’s London headquarters to read passages from their books. Earlier in the evening, there had been an audible buzz in the room as Miodownik read from the introduction of Stuff Matters, in which he describes how, as a teenager, he was slashed with a razor blade during an attempted mugging, and how he became obsessed with materials and their properties afterwards. (He is now a materials engineer at University College London.)
Still, the evening’s “Oscar moment”, in which Royal Society president Paul Nurse pulled the winner’s name out of a gold envelope, was a surprise: bookmaker William Hill had rated Stuff Matters as a 4-1 outsider, and Miodownik’s competition included two authors, Philip Ball and George Johnson, who had made the shortlist in previous years (Ball won in 2005; Johnson was shortlisted in 1992 and 2001).
“It feels like an FA Cup final where Watford are against Liverpool and somehow Watford managed to sneak a win – I don’t understand how that happened,” Miodownik told Physics World at a reception after the ceremony. “It’s a cliché but I felt just very privileged to be there on that shortlist.” (Click below to hear more from Miodownik.)
This is the second year in a row that a book with a physics connection has won the £25,000 Royal Society Winton Prize. Last year’s award winner, Sean Carroll’s The Particle at the End of the Universe, was about the discovery of the Higgs boson, and in a way Stuff Matters makes a nice counterbalance. By focusing on the science of common materials such as concrete and chocolate, rather than the more unusual stuff cooked up in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, it reminds us that physics is a broad discipline, concerned with the everyday as well as the exotic.
If reading about the Royal Society’s prize has you hankering for even more science-book excitement, watch this space. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be announcing the shortlist for Physics World’s own “Book of the Year” award. While it’s infinitely less lucrative than the Royal Society’s gong (which receives financial support from the hedge-fund firm Winton Capital Management), we’ve got a strong list of past awardees, including Graham Farmelo for his landmark biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, and biophysicist Werner Loewenstein, who won last year for his book Physics in Mind. Who will be next?
