Books written to show nonphysicists the world as a physicist sees it have a long history. In 1939 George Gamow published Mr Tompkins in Wonderland, which described how the world would look were the universal constants to take on very different values—for example, if the speed of light were 10 m/s. Between 1980 and 1986, James Trefil wrote six books with titles like A Scientist at the Seashore, in which commonly observed phenomena were carefully described and then qualitatively analyzed. Brian Greene explored cosmology in his 2005 The Fabric of the Cosmos. All three of these authors tell a story both correctly and well, in a manner that is compelling to the untrained reader. I am delighted to add Helen Czerski, author of the new book Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life, to that distinguished company.
Authors write best about what they know well. Czerski is a physicist at University College London who studies the behavior of bubbles and films of bubbles; her expertise is in phenomena at the human scale as opposed to those of elementary particles or galactic clusters. Each of her nine chapters tells a story with a rich and varied cast of people, objects, ideas, and events. We encounter trees and towels, ketchup and snails, blown glass and duck feet, and human beings. How do the inhabitants of her chapters behave? How are they the same? How can we come to understand them? Replete with historical detail, the writing makes us care about what Czerski’s dramatis personae will do, why they will do it, and what will result.
In chapter 3, for example, we are introduced to water and some of its wonderful properties through a careful consideration of a coffee stain on a tabletop. After two pages, we have seen how coffee particles are moved about by evaporating water molecules, and we are ready and eager to learn why milk doesn’t separate. So we turn the page to read about milk and what we see is this:
Before you can worry about things that are too small to see, you have to know that they’re there. Humanity faced a catch-22 here—if you don’t know there’s anything there, why would you go looking for it? But all of that changed in 1665 with the publication of one book, the first scientific bestseller: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia.
Then follow two delightful pages of scientific history centered on Hooke’s newly developed microscope. The historical exploration allows Czerski to elegantly segue between the force that dominated chapters 1 and 2, gravity, and the force needed for her current story, surface tension.
So, on to the story of milk and cream—but not so fast. There is time for a description of the foil-covered English milk bottles that were once delivered to door steps in the early morning and the English blue tits that learned to fly to the bottles, peck holes in the foil, and drink from the cream that floated on the top. Now we can look at how fat globules move through water at a rate that depends on their size and learn why homogenized milk has fat globules with just one-fifth the radius of those in ordinary pasteurized milk. The cream in homogenized milk rises so slowly that we see no sign of it, and the blue tits must look elsewhere for their breakfast.
In the rest of chapter 3, we meet Egyptian mummies with consumption and learn about the physics of bubble baths, 2.8-mile ocean swims, and towels. Finally, we arrive at a grove of California redwoods, which Czerski describes with poetic flair: “The forest is quiet and humid. It feels as though it must always have been like this, as though change is rare here … there’s a looming patch of darkness in the forest, something that doesn’t fit… . It’s a thousand-year-old colossus lurking among the youngsters, stamping its status on the forest with its shadow.”
Then we learn how the scientific principles explained earlier in the chapter dictate the trees’ needle size and how the structure of the needles and the properties of water limit the height of trees. Finally, we travel across the US to Harvard University where blood chemistry laboratories are being developed on paper the size of a postage stamp. That blood test technology relies on the same principles that dictate the trees’ size, and it may save millions of lives across the world.
There is real science in Czerski’s stories, and it’s described in a serious manner. But what I love about the book is that it is always clear that science is a human-centered activity performed by people. Science tells stories for everyone, not just a small community of geeks.
As should be apparent, I think Storm in a Teacup will entertain and educate any person with a healthy curiosity about the natural world. I have only one complaint to register, and that is the complete lack of pictures and illustrations. In a hundred places images would enrich the story and delight the reader. But that objection pales in comparison to what Czerski has written. Encourage her to write more; buy this book.
Brad Halfpap is a solid-state experimental physicist. He has been primarily a teacher for the past two decades and is currently a member of the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Montana.
