NON- FICTION
Storm In A Teacup: the physics of everyday life By HELEN CZERSKI
TO MAKE THE POINT that the forces that govern the universe also determine what goes on in your house can be a revealing strategy for pop science exploration or a banal statement of the obvious. The difference lies in the skill of the person making the point.
Helen Czerski is both a physicist and a BBC television presenter. The odds, then, suggest this book should be a winner. Sadly, this turns out not to be the case. Though certainly not without merit – and containing a host of fascinating facts and figures – the book is nevertheless weighed down by a curiously opaque style, and hampered by less than rigorous editing.
Storm In A Teacup contains nine chapters, each exploring a separate area of physics, including gas laws, gravity, viscosity, equilibrium, atoms and electromagnetism. The approach is the same for each: start with something small and familiar, illustrate the principle of physics at issue, and then broaden focus to encompass both subatomic and cosmological perspectives.
It’s a serviceable enough approach, but its success depends crucially on conveying delight and enthusiasm in revealing the momentous forces that shape the banalities of day-to-day life.
Czerski does, no doubt, derive these little pleasures but she has a sometimes awkward way of showing it. Her chapter on equilibrium, for instance, opens by way of tomato ketchup and its tendency to be difficult to extract from the bottle in an orderly manner. It’s a functional observation, but a depressingly hackneyed one, extended over three pages. Her intent is to make the point that timescales – rapid or slow movements – change the way solids and liquids behave; but at that length, ketchup just isn’t that interesting.
Attention is sustained by hope (fainter at every sentence) the author might be about to plunge us into the fascinating world of non-newtonian fluids, of which ketchup is a great example. But the subject never crops up. This is odd, given that when not on the telly Czerki’s speciality is fluid dynamics and bubble formation.
The ketchup introduction does, however, eventually lead to this statement: “Time matters for coffee and pigeons and tall buildings, and the timescale that matters is different for each of them.” This neatly epitomises Czerski’s most noticeable stylistic trait, a tendency to stand just on the wrong side of the dividing line between illuminating and dull.
A little later in the same chapter, for instance, she discusses the idea of equilibrium, opening with the attentiongrabbing statement that “Mid-afternoon teabreak is an essential part of my working day.” This introduces a multi-page exploration of the fact that coffee sloshes in a cup if you try to walk with it, and that different sized cups produce different rates of slosh.
“A mostly full mug always sloshes the same number of times each second, however big the initial push was,” she writes, roughly halfway through the section. “But that number depends on the mug, and the thing that matters most is the mug radius.”
There are quite an array of passages in the book that require (with the best will in the world) an extra burst of concentration from the reader to combat the temptation to glance sideways at something shiny.
Occasionally, too, one can be forgiven for thinking that perhaps Czerski herself drifted off a wee bit during the writing. How else, for instance, can one explain a sentence, complete with disordered syntax, such as this: “Fossil fuels are made of up plants that built themselves using energy from the Sun, diverting that energy from its alternative outlet: gentle warmth, which is the equivalent of the bottom of the river when it comes to usefulness.”
One might have expected an editor to suggest reframing the sentence such that its meaning was clear and its constituent parts in the correct order but, annoyingly, throughout the book the author has been poorly served in this regard.
Mostly the editing flaws are minor, but irritating in their number: the inclusion of both imperial and metric units in the first few pages, for instance, or a missing capital in a species binomial. Simple things.
More complex things, too, could have greatly assisted the text. In her chapter on atoms, for instance, Czerski uses minor variants of the phrase “we can’t see the individual atoms” three times in four paragraphs. In the hands of a skilled writer, repetition can be used to great effect; in this case, you get the feeling, it was just that nobody re-read the section.
A little later in the chapter, the author relates how while making a television documentary she experienced a monsoon in India. For a tantalising paragraph or two an interesting anecdote seems set to emerge, only to gradually morph into a description of how wet clothes do, or do not, dry.
In the end, the reader is left with little insight into the passions and excitements of the author – in contrast to the experience of reading other physics popularisers, such as Richard Feynman, or Brian Greene. What we do discover, though, is that Helen Czerski likes diving, although not from anything higher than five metres above the water, and is fascinated by ways to stop her swimming goggles fogging up. And that, like the book itself, is as enthralling as it gets.
THERE’S A TENDENCY TO STAND JUST ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE DIVIDING LINE BETWEEN ILLUMINATING AND DULL.