When Mark Miodownik was fifteen, someone slashed him with a razor blade on the London Underground. As the police took his statement, he found himself thinking less about the attacker and more about the blade. How could something so thin be so sharp? What was steel, exactly? Why did it behave the way it did? The obsession that followed led to a PhD in materials science and eventually to this book.
Stuff Matters is organized around a photograph of Miodownik sitting on a rooftop. Each chapter examines a material visible in the photo: the steel of the railing, the concrete of the building, the glass of his window, the paper in his hand, the plastic of his pen, the porcelain of his cup, the chocolate he is eating, the foam of his chair cushion, the graphite in his pencil, and the biological material of his own body.
The treatment of each material goes deeper than you would expect. The concrete chapter traces how Roman concrete, which used volcanic ash, has lasted two thousand years while modern concrete cracks within decades. The steel chapter explains why a samurai sword is both hard and flexible, a combination that seems contradictory until you understand the crystal structure of carbon steel. The chocolate chapter covers the polymorphic forms of cocoa butter and why tempering chocolate is actually a materials engineering problem.
Miodownik writes with genuine delight. He is not performing enthusiasm. He is the kind of person who picks up a paper clip and thinks about the wire-drawing process that made it. This could be tiresome in the wrong hands, but Miodownik has a light touch and a talent for connecting material properties to everyday experiences. Why do some things feel warm and others cold, even at the same temperature? Because materials conduct heat at different rates, and your skin detects the rate of heat transfer, not the temperature itself.
The book won the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2014 and has been widely praised for making materials science accessible and engaging. Miodownik hosts a BBC series on related topics and directs the Institute of Making at University College London, which is exactly what it sounds like: a place where people come to understand the materials that make up the physical world.
Stuff Matters is short, each chapter can be read independently, and the subject matter is literally all around you. After reading it, you will never look at a pane of glass the same way.
