Exploring the Materials That Shape The Modern World

Reviewing the book ‘Stuff Matters’ By Mark Miodownik

This book was a pleasant surprise. No idea how I came across it. But the title intrigued me. A book about… materials. That doesn’t sound very exciting, honestly. But it had good reviews, and it made me wonder, what exactly do I know about materials? Nothing, really. It flashed some memories of my father, who always seemed to know everything related to materials. Maybe from his architecture background, maybe from his knowledge of decades doing house reparations or general manual labour. Something I never inherited, arriving in the world at the start of a digital age and getting used to either buying something new when something breaks or paying someone else to do it.

The author is a Professor of Materials and Society, and he is fascinated with materials. This strongly shows in the book, and his passion and curiosity really enrich the reading experience. The book is divided into several materials, and he explains both the history and the science behind them. Although it is not simply a random collection of facts, it feels coherent and with some narrative. Materials include steel, concrete, plastic, glass, ceramic, and even chocolate.

What amazed me the most is how important materials are for the development of civilization of how we know it. For example, I never really considered how advancements in paper made the transition from an oral to a written culture or how something as simple as glass can be the foundation of the scientific revolution since, without it, there is no microscope. The East was for a long time more technologically advanced than the West, for example, but they never used glass. We liked glass simply because we used it for windows, while the East used paper. And this may have played some role in why they lagged behind in terms of scientific advancement after being the leaders for so long. Or how Pyrex, which I’ve so often used to store and heat my leftovers, allowed chemistry to flourish. Without it, the only material available would be glass, but that makes heating and cooling problematic because it easily shatters.

The importance of materials is somewhat obvious after reading examples like these, but it’s not quite something I thought about. In addition, it also made me more aware of how complex things we take for granted are. For example, a blacksmith hitting a piece of metal seems something rather straightforward, yet there what he is doing is very complex chemistry, changing the shape of the metal crystals within it by “nucleating” nanoscale dislocations. Of course, that’s not what he is thinking, but it is what he is doing. And a lot of technology that allowed civilization to progress was advancements in chemistry and material science without quite knowing the precise scientific details. And, of course, as our scientific understanding grew, we could more easily manipulate these processes with more direct intent rather than trial and error.

It was truly a marvellous read, and it’s the type of book that I think almost anyone would enjoy, even more so if you’re pretty ignorant about materials (like me). Although I did gift the book to my father, which is certainly more knowledgeable than I am, he still enjoyed it. It’s also relatively short, so I won’t take a lot of your time. Not only is the topic fascinating, but the writer is superb. There is a chapter where while the author is in the cinema, someone complains that the sweets are sold in a plastic bag rather than paper as when he was younger. The writer, years later, comes up with a drama-play that would have tried to convince him why plastic does deserve to be in a cinema room instead of paper, given that without plastic, cinema would have never been possible. This was so well done that this short story is worth reading as a stand-alone.

Do you know anything about the materials surrounding you? The metal and plastic that your phone or computer that you’re reading this is made out of? Probably not, so reading this. If you are, then read it anyway, it’s great.

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Thanks for reading!