Discovering the Beauty behind the Mundane

I’ve often found it difficult to find a thoroughly engaging popular science book.

I tend to find them either far too elementary or with a writing style too stilted and formal to be a truly engaging read. Those that can be easily enjoyed while still remaining informative tend to be few and far between.

One book that manages this seemingly impossible task is Mark Miodownik’s book Stuff Matters, which explores the fundamental principles behind the properties of various materials that we see and use in our everyday lives. Miodownik takes the subject matter at hand and presents it in such an engaging manner as to keep any reader glued to its pages.

While many books of this sort risk falling into a monotonous tone, listing properties and their causes, Miodownik draws the reader into his life and his mind, and explains why the world of materials has held his interest for so long.

He begins with a funny anecdote of his first encounter with the various properties of materials – namely, being stabbed as a schoolboy.

Although this introduction seems to be a hard act to follow, the book continues with similar flair throughout. Miodownik combines amusing backstories with technical explanations, maintaining the affability and humor that engaged the reader at the start while addressing the material at a suitable level so as to be interesting.

No matter your level of knowledge in materials science, this captures your interest without seeming either dull or aloof. Stuff Matters is a book which would appeal to an extremely wide range of readers, from those with little to no scientific background to those who may have been in a scientific field for years.

Each chapter begins with a rather ingenious method of illustrating how reliant our world is upon the materials that are discussed in the book, and emphasizes how little the average person tends to think about how these vital materials came to be used in our daily lives. Miodownik uses a picture of himself, sitting on his rooftop, and isolates individual materials present in the picture for each chapter.

After briefly introducing the history of the item in question and the sentimental value, he then jumps into the molecular and atomic behavior of the material that define its crazy and unique characteristics. In this way, he discusses everything from steel to paper, even managing to make concrete fascinating and the development of glass entrancing. There’s even a chapter devoted exclusively to the molecular attributes of chocolate! (That chapter was mouth-watering as well as interesting) At the end, Miodownik devotes a chapter as an overview of the whole book to synergize the concepts discussed in the previous chapters, and allows the reader to take in just how amazing the development of materials over the course of human history actually is.

Stuff Matters is an exceptional read, Miodownik animates the inanimate world in such a way that you will never be able to look at even a staple in the same way again. It is more than a book recounting the different properties of various materials.

The book is a vivid, deftly written, and a humorous account of why we should all be interested in materials science.