| THE MAGIC FURNACE: The Search for the Origins of Atoms Marcus Chown Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-19-514305-8 | ||||
| ISBN 0-19-514305-1 | 232pp. | HC | $25.00 | |
The quest to understand the building blocks of matter began in Ancient Greece when, around 450 B.C., the sage Democritus first proposed that all things are made of tiny indivisible particles. It took more than 2,000 years before we began to understand what these particles, which Democritus called a-tomos (Greek for "uncuttable"), really are. Some of the scientists who contributed to this understanding are well known — Avogadro, Boltzmann, Boyle, Marie Curie, Lavoisier, Mendeleev, Rutherford, Thomson. In fact, the true nature of atoms was a hugely complex puzzle, one that took a host of investigators to unravel.1 Many of them are relatively obscure. One such is William Prout, who in 1815 guessed that atoms must be composed of still smaller parts.
As our understanding of atoms developed, another puzzle became apparent: What makes the Sun shine? It turns out that the answer to this puzzle is, at bottom, the same as the answer to what atoms are.
In The Magic Furnace, Marcus Chown traces this millennia-long quest up to the present. He divides the story into three parts. The basic discoveries, that atoms exist and can be detected, and that they are not after all indivisible, are the subject of Part One. Part Two focuses on sunlight, for, as they learned the true age of the Sun, scientists realized there was no known process that could keep it shining for so long — yet, it shines. Finally, unraveling this mystery led naturally to the third puzzle: how the wide variety of chemical elements came to be. And this is covered in Part Three.
Chown is cosmology consultant for the British magazine New Scientist and the author of a previous book, Afterglow of Creation, an award-winning explanation of the Big Bang. Here, in The Magic Furnace, he unfolds the millennia-long quest and its multitude of participants in what I think of as "old-school" fashion — as a series of connected episodes, each linked to the next by a one-sentence summary of the next facet of the problem to be investigated. I was most interested in Part Three, but I found the entire story fascinating and worth reading from the beginning. Chown enlivens his account with details of the scientists' personalities, incidents of competition and parallel discovery, and occasional happy accidents (as when Fred Hoyle,2 assigned to a wartime conference in Washington, DC, found he had three days free and could hop a train to Princeton, NJ and confer with astronomer Henry Norris Russell.) Heroes, too, appear in the narrative.3
A glossary, select bibliography, and an index4 are included. The book contains no illustrations. It would have benefitted from them, especially on page 15, where the first images of atoms, obtained by a scanning tunneling microscope, are described. In addition, there are a few errors, a few questionable statements (listed in my Errata page as usual). None of this, however, really detracts from the worth of the book. I recommend it unreservedly.
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