What Einstein Told His Cook

What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained
© 2002  Richard Wolke
369 pages

What did Einstein tell his cook?  ..I still don’t know. I have learned, however, that it is possible to make a jello out of champagne;  that concrete sidewalks, even during  a Houston summer,  are unlikely to warm up to the precise temperature needed to fry an egg;    why bottled Coca-Colas can go flat, despite being sealed (the plastic allows Co2 to escape);  and why carmelized onions are called that when they’re fried into delicious brownness.  What Einstein Told His Cook consists wholly of question-and-answer, the question being those lobbed at the author.    The format reminded me strongly of Ask a Science Teacher, but with an adult audience.  In that book, the Q and A was relieved every so often with DYI science experiments; here, variety is added with interesting recipes, including one for champagne jello.  The author brings a strong sense of humor to the table, and is writing for a completely lay audience - -though he does have more technical explanations in parentheses, for readers who have a little more background reading pop science books.   Although not as substantive as I’d hoped,  What Einstein Told His Cook is nonetheless completely entertaining, and there’s more than enough chemistry here to make it a serious read, too.  There is an book on the complete science of booking, but it’s a thousand page mammoth called The Food Lab. I didn'’t know it existed until it appeared on a friend of mine’s wedding registry.  

Stuff Matters

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World
© 2014 Mark Miodownik
272 pages

Stuff Matters begins with a photo of the authorhaving coffee on the roof of his London flat, the table before him scattered with papers and the unremarkable clutter of everyday life.  That clutter, however, is composed of stuff that makes modern life unimaginable without it.  Stuff Matters scrutinizes each object in turn, and is thus a bundle of microhistories with  strong scientific undercurrent.  Mark Miodownik combines a history of how a material like porcelain came into being with an analysis of why they work -- why glass is transparent, why stainless steel can effectively repair itself,  how prosthetics can fool the body into thinking they're just part of the gang.  Miodownik often adds a personal touch, as he has a genuine obsession with materials science: if he's stabbed or thrown through a window, his first thoughts are about the feel and wonder of the materials he's passing through (or which are passing through him).   He would share Carl Sagan's conviction that the beauty of a living thing -- in Miodownik's case, just a thing -- is not the atoms that go into it, but the way they're put together.  After all, diamonds and graphite have the same atomic core, being made of pure carbon, but they're fundamentally different substances because of the way their carbon atoms are connected. 

The Disappearing Spoon

The Disappearing Spoon
© 2010 Sam Kean
400 pages

A massive poster of the periodic table is as elemental to the image of a science classroom as the rows of graduated cylinders and microscopes,   but there is considerably more to that table than other reference materials --  like  a table of statistics about planet volumes,  orbital velocities,  and composition, for instance.   The periodic table’s peculiar shape, its neat columns and rows,  are not only orderly in themselves but speak to cosmic order;    elements which are very near each other in terms of their number of protons, neutrons, and electrons are worlds away from one another in their physical characteristics – and the reverse. The Disappearing Spoon is a human history of the periodic table, built on the author’s suspicion that every element had a story worth telling associated with. Perhaps it was discovered on accident; perhaps it consumed generations,  or lead to the collapse of armies and the failure of expeditions to the South Pole.    Many of the stories here address the elements’ discoveries, including rivalries to isolate them first – rivalries between men and nations alike.  The stories cover a lot of ground between them, and include as much history and literary references  as they do chemistry.    All in all, it's great fun...but despite the title, there's no Matrix jokes.  Turns out the disappearing spoon is made of gallium -- just pop a gallium spoon into a cup of tea, and it melts away.  

A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

The Canon: A whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science
© 2007 Natalie Angier
293 pages

Science is amazing! Why is so much of the writing about it so lame?   Natalie Angier's The Canon first reviews the principles of scientific thinking before talking - nay, gushing -- about the basics of physics, chemistry, cosmology, biology,  astronomy, and geology.   But this isn't just a science primer like Almost Everyone's Guide to Science, or Theories for Everything. It is written with a conscious desire to seem fun, so the author is borderline bubbly and generous with cultural references and wordplay.  It's sometimes distracting, but I enjoyed it on the whole.  The personable approach to science also manifests itself in the way Angier works in little stories about her life that relate (like being thunderstruck by an earthquake in her normally placid residence in  D.C.), or interviews with scientists in the field, whose own love and continuing wonder for their subject is part of the delivery.   This is definitely a layman's approach to science -- there's no graphs, equations, or tables to be found, no terrifying mathematics -- but what made a winner for me, from the get-go, were the opening chapters on thinking scientifically. Angier sells the scientific method to readers by connecting it to what they already do: for instance,  the act of troubleshooting a technical problem is similar, as we attempt to narrow down problems by focusing on one variable at a time. A reader who reads Brian Greene with ease may find Angier's lively -- manic, even --  romp through the lab to be silly, but I found her enthusiasm welcome and the wordplay diverting.  A sample from her chapter on geology:

The planet we inhabit, the bedrock base on which we build our lives, is in a profound sense alive as well, animate form from end to end and core to skin. Earth, as I said earlier, is often called the Goldilocks planet, where conditions are just right for life and it is neither too hot nor too cold, where atoms are free to form molecules and water droplets to pool into seas. There is something about Goldilocks, beyond her exacting tastes, that makes her a noteworthy character, a fitting focus for our attentions. The girl cannot sit still. She's restless and impulsive and surprisingly rude. She wanders off into woods without saying where she's headed or when she'll be home. She barges through doors uninvited, helps herself to everybody else's food, and breaks the furniture. But don't blame her. She can't help herself. Goldilocks is so raw and brilliant that she has to let off steam. Like Goldilocks the protagonist, Goldilocks the planet is a born dynamo, and without her constant twitching, humming, and seat bouncing, her intrinsic animation, Earth would not have any oceans, or skies, or buffers against the sun's full electromagnetic fury; and we animate beings, we DNA bearers, would never have picked  ourselves up off the floor.   The transaction was not one-sided, though. The restless, heave-hoing motions of the planet helped give rise to life, and restless life, in turn, reshaped Earth." 

Napoleon's Buttons

Napoleon's Buttons
384 pages
© 2003 Penny LeCouter

Napeolon's Buttons is microhistory in the truest sense of the world, a mix of science and history that not only dwells on the historical impact of various substances (cotton, sugar, chloroflourocarbons, silk), but examines the science behind their invention -- presenting a diagram of a silk molecule, for instance, to explain why it is so smooth and lustrous.   At times, the connections to global history are a bit of a stretch, as when the author repeats speculation that lead poisoning brought down the Roman empire and leads off with musing over the prospect that decaying lead buttons doomed Napoleon's winter expedition. At other times, there is no denying the impact;  Britain's interest in southeast Asia, for instance,  involved three resources of import: opium, caffiene, and tobacco, and as covered by John Keay's The Spice Trade, interest in nutmeg (among other spices) spurred on the age of discovery.  LeCouter's  chosen topics interact with one another, however, and the chapter she leads off with (abscorbic acid) informs the latter section on the age of discovery. An era inaugurated by the search for one topic was made possible only through another: if scurvy had continued to claim the lives of European seamen,  such extended voyages would not have been possible.  Buttons combines the usual close-to-home historical interest of works like Salt and An Edible History of Humanity with a strong dose of chemistry.

The Ingredients

The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements
© Phillip Ball 2002
216 pages

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,

And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium [...]

(Tom Lehrer, "The Elements").

Chemistry is not an arcane subject solely practiced in a lab with flasks of mysterious looking fluids. It is nothing less than the study of what everything is made of, and how the elements work together. In The Ingredients, Nature editor Phillip Ball introduces readers to the human story of chemistry -- its history, importance, and some fundamental concepts.

The title is partially misleading;  Ball's work isn't a comprehensive catalogue of the elements, but an introduction to appreciating the field. He begins with the Greeks,, then uses the discovery of oxygen to cover the birth of modern chemistry. A following chapter on gold illustrates the fact that attempts at chemistry have been  pervasive throughout human history. Subsequent chapters introduce the periodic table, and thus our modern understanding of chemistry, and establishes its basis in physics by examining the basic parts and how they came to be discovered. "The Chemical Brothers" covers isotopes -- different 'flavors' of particular elements, like Carbon-14 and Uranium-236 -- which have practical uses, from dating to nuclear energy.  The final section ("For All Practical Purposes") examines the role of various sundry elements, many of which are not commonly known by the public, as parts of products we use every day.  Ball accomplishes the same thing here that Spangenburg and Moser did in their "On the Shoulders of Giants" series: he imparts to the reader an understanding of the fundamentals of chemistry and the personalities that shaped it, while never coming off like a lecturer.  The result is a breezily fun but thorough grounding in the subject, and one worth your while in the interests of general scientific literacy.

[...] these are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,

And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered!

(Tom Lehrer, "The Elements")