Book Review: Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stuff-Matters-Marvellous-Materials-Man-made/dp/0241955181

This is a review of a book I recently read about materials. I hope to study natural science at Cambridge, specializing in physical sciences, and so in my first year I would be taking a module in materials science (along with maths, physics and computer science). I therefore decided to read this book to introduce myself to the subject.

The book contains 11 chapters on the following topics:

Metals
Paper
Concrete
Chocolate
Aerogel
Plastic
Glass
Carbon
Ceramics
Biomaterials
An Overview and Conclusion

This book was a good introduction to materials science. It takes simple materials that we see in our everyday lives and discusses why they have certain properties. Some areas that are explored are: why are metals as hard as rock but able to be bent, why cutlery has no taste, why is chocolate delicious, why is some glass bullet proof and so on... The range of topics covered was a strength of the book as it gave me a good overview of aspects of materials science.

The style of writing made it very easy to read and accessible to everyone including those who do not study science and are simply interested in learning a little about materials science. It contains no equations or complex theory on the structure of materials.
The style of the book made it particularly entertaining as it wasn't just chapters listing properties of materials and why they had these properties. There was a story told while introducing each material, usually talking about previous materials used for its job and how the new material came about.

The chapter on plastic was particularly interesting and creative. It told the story of the first plastic (celluloid) in the format of a film script. The first plastic was highly flammable and so the story is centered around an accident which occurred when the plastic ended up exploding.

As someone who enjoys mathematics, I was disappointed that book did not to contain any equations to show the maths behind materials science. I was also hoping for a slightly deeper scientific explanations on the topics in preparation for undergraduate level materials science.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone wanting a basic idea of what materials science is about or to anyone interested in science as a whole. The approach to the topics and the style of writing makes the book entertaining. If you purely want a deeper understanding however and perhaps already know a bit about materials science, then this book is probably not worth reading.

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Check out my other reviews! (Link to all reviews)

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Seven Brief Lessons On Physics By Carlo Rovelli

The Essence Of Calculus (Youtube Series)

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