Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

by Mark Miodownik

Money is at its most seductive in its paper form. There are few more pleasing things in life than typing your PIN into a hole in the wall and being served up lovely, crisp banknotes. In sufficient quantity they are a passport to anything and anywhere in the world, and this freedom is intoxicating. They are also the most sophisticated pieces of paper that have ever been made, which they need to be because they are a literal, material manifestation of the trust we all have in the whole economic system.

People love books, more perhaps than they love the written word. They use them as a way to define who they are and to provide physical evidence of their values. Books on shelves and on tables are a kind of internal marketing exercise,

The most impressive piece of Roman concrete engineering, however, is in its capital: the dome of the Pantheon in Rome. Still standing today, it is two thousand years old but still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

There were no concrete structures for more than a thousand years after the Romans stopped making it.

But, as luck would have it, steel and concrete have almost identical coefficients of expansion. In other words, they expand and contract at almost the same rate. This is a minor miracle,

The reason why any sugar molecule—whether in a cocoa bean or a pan or anywhere else—turns brown when heated is to do with the presence of carbon.

If an atom were the size of an athletics stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a pea at its center, and the electrons would be the size of grains of sand in the surrounding stands.