STUFF MATTERS
Mark Miodownik
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt;
252 pages; $26
I once met a man with magic in his pocket. He was a former hairdresser named Maurice Ward, and the magic was a material he invented called Starlite. He said it was one of the most astonishing thermal barriers in the world and had been tested in high-profile labs, including a British atomic weapons facility, where it withstood several simulated nuclear flashes. Despite its dizzying potential - fireproof airplanes, laser-resistant tanks - Starlite never ventured far out of Ward's pocket, because he refused to sell or reveal its recipe before his death a couple of years ago. I mention this because it still intrigues me, as a good mystery should, and because it was my first encounter with the head-scratching, captivating possibilities of man-made materials.
Mark Miodownik's book was the second. The mundanity of the title may be deliberate, for Stuff Matters is about hidden wonders, the astonishing properties of materials we think boring, banal and unworthy of attention - paper, concrete, glass, plastic. They are given what the sociologist Erving Goffman called "civil inattention", lumped together under the ample but unilluminating category of "stuff", even though some varieties of that stuff have been so important, historically, that eras have been named after them: Stone, Bronze, Iron.
Mr Miodownik is a professor of materials and society at University College London. Along with that marvellous title, he has a Ph D in jet engine alloys. But that might all have been immaterial - sorry - if he couldn't also write; if he didn't know that starting a book thus - "As I stood on a train bleeding from what would later be classified as a 13-centimeter stab wound, I wondered what to do" - would pull readers into his world, as surely as iron to magnets. He describes being stunned by the stabbing (an attempted robbery), but also by the staple that held together the police report. The assailant's razor blade was steel, and so was the humble staple. How could one be so unbendingly sharp and the other bend?
The answer is that materials have inner lives. Materials are seen as solids, but inside they are fluid. They transform, often puzzlingly, so that the metal in a paper clip or staple can bend, because metals are composed of crystals, and they bend too. The discipline of material sciences may be recent, but our efforts to transform materials into useful forms are ancient. Dislocating crystals by heating malachite and getting copper was "a spectacular growth in human technology". The pyramids were built using 300,000 copper chisels.
Similarly, the book's structure is simple only at first glance. It begins with a photograph of Mr Miodownik on his London rooftop that cleverly gives us the book's essential elements, among them an ostentatious glass building in the background known as the Shard, a ceramic teacup, a book and Converse sneakers. Mr Miodownik takes us into the shrouded architecture and history of each of these materials, drawing on "psychophysics", the study of how humans react sensually to materials. Psychophysics wants to know why we accept steel for kitchen sinks but not for toilets, why we wax lyrical about a wooden floor or a cast-iron railway station but rarely about an ordinary window made from the wonderful invention that is glass (when, after all, it took an impressive imagination for someone to walk along a beach, look at the sand and see windows). Each chapter's material is also given an attribute; plastic is "imaginative", porcelain is "refined".
Some sections are more successful than others. The psychophysical perspective on paper ("trusted") doesn't persuade, for a start. I don't think that a love letter is a "simulacrum of the loved one's skin", or that unwrapping a present is like giving the gift inside a new birth.
It's impossible to argue with chocolate's classification as "delicious", however. Mr Miodownik loves chocolate; he eats it twice a day, every day. The science is equally appetising. Chocolate is a "material poem", as wondrous as steel or concrete, "designed to transform into a liquid as soon as it hits your mouth. This trick is the culmination of hundreds of years of culinary and engineering effort". I like chocolate, too, but perhaps not enough to crave so many pages on its triglycerides. Never mind. Forays into Science 101 are quickly interrupted by some Honduran farmers, fermenting cocoa beans in piles in a jungle to yield fruity ester molecules that turn bitter cocoa into sweeter chocolate, or Japanese smiths who make "chewy" metal for samurai swords.
Concrete's chapter attribute is "fundamental". It is, of course, but its place in our affections is more wobbly, which makes Mr Miodownik's discussion of the Shard glass tower so intriguing. The structure's reinforced concrete core is the real wonder; its combination of steel, concrete and water forms an internal architecture that will strengthen itself, for years. The Shard is concrete done right, but badly mixed concrete, with too much or too little water, crumbles in earthquakes. We can't know how many "concrete time bombs" are weakening to dangerous levels, invisibly and lethally, but we will continue to find out, disastrously.
Molecules and materials are captivating characters, but there are others. A Miodownik grandparent spraying mucus over the dining room table. Exploding billiard balls, in several scenes of a mock Wild West movie. Rayleigh scattering and Janus particles (the construction blocks of e-book reading), and silica aerogel, a material that is 99.8 per cent air, and which Mr Miodownik compares to holding a piece of sky (a lovely image that loses some power when repeated a few pages later). Invented in the 1930s by an American farmer and chemist named Samuel Kistler, aerogel "ended up being used ignominiously as a thickening agent in screwworm salves for sheep". Kistler died unaware that aerogel would be adopted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or Nasa, to catch the passing particles of comets. From screwworm to stardust.
Materials, Mr Miodownik concludes, are so much more than "blobs of differently coloured matter". They are wonders - "self-healing concrete", a jelly that catches stars. I now know to read up on concrete, a previously unthinkable activity, and I'll never think of Tutankhamen without remembering that he was found wearing a scarab with a piece of natural glass 26 million years old that was probably forged by a meteor that struck the white sands of the Libyan desert. It's possible this science and these stories have been told elsewhere, but like the best chocolatiers, Mr Miodownik gets the blend right.
© 2014 The New York Times News Service
