Stuff Matters
by Mark Miodownik
Summary
Miodownik is a materials scientist at University College London, and this is a book about the ten substances in a photograph of himself sitting on his roof. Steel, paper, concrete, chocolate, foam, plastic, glass, graphite, porcelain and one implant. A chapter each.
The premise sounds slight and turns out to be the opposite. Every material has a chapter title that reads like a character reference, indomitable or trusted or imaginative, because Miodownik is as interested in our relationships with these substances as in their crystal structures. He explains why steel can be both hard and bendable, why chocolate is engineered to melt at exactly body temperature, why concrete keeps failing and how it is being taught to heal itself, and why a razor blade goes blunt. The scientific content is real and it is not diluted.
What makes it work is that he keeps his hands on things. The book opens with him being stabbed on a London train as a schoolboy and becoming fascinated by the steel that did it, and that habit of starting from an object in the world never lets up. He is very good company, funny without straining, and he never makes you feel stupid for not knowing.
If you have ever picked something up and wondered why it feels the way it does, this answers questions you did not know were answerable. It works equally well for a curious teenager and for an adult who last did any science at school and has quietly assumed ever since that the subject was closed to them.
Historical Context & Significance
Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man Made World won the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, then worth twenty five thousand pounds. The prize was presented by Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel laureate who was president of the Royal Society at the time.
The Royal Society prize exists to reward science writing that a reader with no training can follow, and this was an unusually clean fit: a working academic writing about the ordinary objects in front of him, with no requirement that the reader arrive with anything but curiosity.
The book made Miodownik a public figure in British science broadcasting, and it helped establish materials science as a subject general readers would pick up voluntarily, which was not obviously true before it. He has continued writing in the same vein, most notably about liquids.