Just Finished Reading: Why Things Break – Understanding the World by the Way It Comes Apart by Mark E Eberhart (FP: 2003)

It was a childhood obsession. Why, when dropped do somethings shatter, some things bend and some things bounce? It certainly wasn’t something as simple as the apparent strength of the substance itself. Alter the temperature enough, add apparently innocuous substances or any other number of small changes could alter a substance from behaving like steel to behaving like glass or, far more intriguingly, the other way round. The search to find why things break would take mankind millennia and the journey isn’t over yet.

For most of our history what became known as materials science was a hit and miss affair. A useful substance would be found and used even if imperfect – like copper – as tools and weapons. In many ways better than stone or wood but tricky to use well. But with the addition of tin in the right quantities copper becomes bronze and will keep a keen edge far longer. Later iron was worked, sometimes by accident sometimes by mistaken design, to produce steel of varying qualities. When chance produced a much superior metal the swords it made echoed down through history. But it was only in the modern age that we began to understand why such transformations occurred at the atomic and then sub-atomic level and we approached the long dreamed of idea of material design. Once we fully understood exactly how adding boron made a hard substance even harder or who adding mercury or hydrogen made a hard substance as brittle as chalk we could begin to produce prefect metals specifically designed for their function and then design completely new materials from the atom up – built to order. Once we have that kind of power almost anything is possible.

Not surprisingly there’s quite a bit of science in this interesting little book. Yet again it wasn’t quite what I expected. I really should stop judging a book by its cover (complete with partially collapsed bridge) and find out what it’s actually about. I was expecting another work of Civil Engineering. I actually had a book on materials science – quite a different beast if an interesting one. Thankfully most of the physics and chemistry in the book was fairly easy to understand – how atoms work and why some substances break apart others. I even reasonably happily followed the author down to the quantum level for discussions of electron shells and the like. He did manage to lose me a few times in the weeds but I managed to retain the gist. There were no conclusions however. The subject area is definitely a work in progress and shows great potential (indeed incredible potential) once we understand exactly how things hold together and why things break. Being able to literally design materials will be an incredible advantage for every conceivable application. The potential and reward are staggering to behold. The author is one of hundreds of scientists across the globe searching for answers to seemingly mundane questions at the literal deepest levels. It’s exciting work and will probably have a serious impact (positive one would hope!) on our children’s lives. It was fascinating to get an insight at the ground level of a science in the making.