Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

Synopsis

‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.’ Hunter S. Thompson’s opening gambit, in his classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has long been my favourite. However, much to my surprise, for pure shock value the first sentence of this book, by Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society at UCL, runs it a close second: ‘As I stood on a train bleeding from what would later be classified as a 13 centimetre stab wound, I wondered what to do,’ he writes dramatically.

It’s an eye-opening way to start any book, and what follows is an action-packed jaunt through the history, atomic make-up, and social meaning of a fistful of materials, including steel, paper, concrete, chocolate, foam, glass, plastic, graphite, porcelain, and various medical materials.

This is how science should be explained: bold, imaginative, witty and fun.