THE ALCHEMY OF US

A user-friendly, wide-ranging history of material science.

A self-described “science evangelist,” Ramirez conveys enthusiasm for her field, which lies at the intersection of physics and chemistry and concerns how one can, in the words of an old mentor, “change the way that atoms act to make them do new things.” Timekeeping, for example, altered human behavior irrevocably. Extend Marshall McLuhan’s “extensions of man” theory of media, and you have an example of a technology that changed how we sleep. “Before the Industrial Revolution,” Ramirez writes, “our ancestors slept at night in two separate intervals,” going to bed around 9:00 or 10:00, awakening after midnight, staying up for an hour or so, and then returning to bed. This “segmented sleep” ended with the invention of not just the clock and its demand for regularity and punctuality, but also artificial light that allowed people to stay up later, turning night into day. (She doesn’t hit on it hard, but there was also the demand of factory and office owners that people show up and stay at work.) Material changes behavior, then—and that change evolves. For example, Samuel Morse missed arriving at his ailing wife’s bed as she lay dying, and she was buried without him, spurring the invention of the telegraph. Ramirez communicates gently but with depth of detail and meaning. One of the best moments in this satisfying book concerns how 43-year-old Carl Sagan came to decide what music should be sent into space on the Voyager mission to illustrate earthling sounds, an inventory that started off as European classical music and ended with a broad range of sounds from around the entire planet. Just so, Ramirez takes pains to include examples of innovators and scientists beyond the usual suspects (though Einstein and company do figure), making the text an inspiration to budding scientists of all backgrounds.

Entertaining and elucidating—popular science done right, with enthusiasm and without dumbing-down.