Each chapter begins with something small - popcorn, coffee stains and refrigerator magnets - and uses it to explain some of the most important science and technology of our time. In Storm in a Teacup, Helen Czerski links the little things we see every day with the big world we live in. Look down on the Earth from space, and you'll find similar swirls in the clouds, made where warm air and cold air waltz. If you pour milk into your tea and give it a stir, you'll see a swirl, a spiral of two fluids, before the two liquids mix completely. Czerski's enthusiasm is infectious because she brings our humdrum everyday world to life, showing us that it is just as fascinating as anything that can be seen by the Hubble Telescope or created at the Large Hadron Collider.' - Jim Al-Khalili Czerski, Helen.'A quite delightful book on the joys, and universality, of physics. How can so much atomic complication lead to something so simple and so consistent? If you double the temperature, you double the volume. A century later, Jacques Charles found that the volume of a gas is directly proportional to its temperature. This is Boyle’s Law, and it says that gas pressure is inversely proportional to volume. They found that as the pressure on a pocket of air increased, its volume decreased. Back in 1662, all that Robert Boyle and his assistant, Robert Hooke, had was glassware, mercury, some trapped air, and just the right amount of ignorance. The idea of atoms wasn’t really a part of science until the early 1800s and absolute proof of their existence didn’t turn up until around 1905. So it’s probably just as well that the pioneers who discovered how gases behave had no idea about any of it. You might think that the sensible approach to all that is to quit while you’re ahead and take up brain surgery or economic theory or hacking supercomputers instead. It’s horrifically messy and complicated - different atoms, different molecules, different speeds - and in each cubic inch of air there are about 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 (3 × 10) individual molecules, each colliding about a billion times a second. In the air I’m breathing as I type this, there are pairs of oxygen atoms (each pair is one oxygen molecule) moving at 900 mph bumping into pairs of nitrogen atoms going at 200 mph, and then maybe bouncing off a water molecule going at over 1,000 mph. Chemistry is the story of those chaperones sharing duties between multiple atoms, shifting formation while always obeying the strict rules of the quantum world, and holding the captive nuclei in larger patterns called molecules. Each of these tiny specks of matter is coated with a distinctive pattern of negatively charged electrons, chaperones to the heavy and positively charged nucleus within. Science is always trying to prove itself wrong, because that’s the quickest route to finding out what’s actually going on. If your hypothesis passes every test we can think of, we cautiously agree that this is probably a good model for the way the world works. In particular, you have to look hard for consequences that you can check for, and especially for consequences that you can prove wrong. That means that if you have an idea about how you think something works, the next thing to do is to work out what the consequences of your idea would be. This is what separates science from other disciplines - a scientific hypothesis must make specific testable predictions. At first, those conclusions may differ, but then you go and collect more data that helps you decide between one description of the world and another, and eventually the conclusions converge. The point of science is that everyone can look at the data and come to a reasoned conclusion. Science isn’t just about collecting facts it’s a logical process for working things out. No one can understand every single detail of our complex world, but the basic principles are fantastically valuable tools to take with you on the way.īecause of all this, I think that playing with the physical toys in the world around us is more than “just fun,” even though I’m a huge fan of fun for its own sake. We vote, we choose what to buy and how to live, and we are collectively part of the human journey. And there’s more than our own daily lives at stake. We need to be able to look at the evidence and work out whether we agree with them. “Critical thinking is essential to make sense of our world, especially with advertisers and politicians all telling us loudly that they know best.
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