The cool and warm air chase each other around in circles, and you can see the pattern clearly on satellite images. They form at the boundary between cold polar air to the north and warm tropical air to the south. In Britain, these swirls come rolling across the Atlantic from the west on a regular basis, causing our notoriously changeable weather. If you look down on the Earth from space, you will often see very similar swirls in the clouds, made where warm air and cold air waltz around each other instead of mixing directly. The same pattern can be seen in other places too, for the same reason. But it was there for long enough to be seen, a brief reminder that liquids mix in beautiful swirling patterns and not by merging instantaneously. In your teacup, the spiral lasts just a few seconds before the two liquids mix completely. If you pour milk into your tea and give it a quick stir, you’ll see a swirl, a spiral of two fluids circling each other while barely touching. The physical world is full of startling variety, caused by the same principles and the same atoms combining in different ways to produce a rich bounty of outcomes. This is the place to look if you’re interested in what makes the universe tick. Our home here on Earth is the opposite: messy, changeable, bursting with novelty and full of things that we touch and tweak every day. Every human civilization has seen the stars, but no one has touched them. On a clear night, anyone can admire the vast legions of bright stars, familiar and permanent, landmarks unique to our place in the cosmos. WE LIVE ON the edge, perched on the boundary between planet Earth and the rest of the universe. “Ooh,” she said, “and what can you do when you know that?” Nana, a down-to-earth northerner, was very impressed when I told her that I was studying the structure of the atom. You may never look at your toaster the same way.While I was a university student, I spent a while doing physics revision at my Nana’s house. But just occasionally a small one can produce something delicious”) gravity (drop some raisins in a bottle of carbonated lemonade and watch the whoosh of bubbles and the dancing raisins at the bottom bumping into each other) size (Czerski explains the action of the water molecules that cause the crime-scene stain left by a puddle of dried coffee) and time (why it takes so long for ketchup to come out of a bottle).Īlong the way, she provides answers to vexing questions: How does water travel from the roots of a redwood tree to its crown? How do ducks keep their feet warm when walking on ice? Why does milk, when added to tea, look like billowing storm clouds? In an engaging voice at once warm and witty, Czerski shares her stunning breadth of knowledge to lift the veil of familiarity from the ordinary.
She guides us through the principles of gases (“Explosions in the kitchen are generally considered a bad idea.
In Storm in a Teacup, Helen Czerski provides the tools to alter the way we see everything around us by linking ordinary objects and occurrences, like popcorn popping, coffee stains, and fridge magnets, to big ideas like climate change, the energy crisis, or innovative medical testing. But these familiar surroundings are just the place to look if you’re interested in what makes the universe tick. Our home here on Earth is messy, mutable, and full of humdrum things that we touch and modify without much thought every day. But did you know that the key to unveiling the secrets of the cosmos is as close as the nearest toaster? Take a look up at the stars on a clear night and you get a sense that the universe is vast and untouchable, full of mysteries beyond comprehension. A physicist explains daily phenomena from the mundane to the magisterial.