Why Things Break
Understanding the World By the Way It Comes Apart
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Did you know—
• It took more than an iceberg to sink the Titanic.
• The Challenger disaster was predicted.
• Unbreakable glass dinnerware had its origin in railroad lanterns.
• A football team cannot lose momentum.
• Mercury thermometers are prohibited on airplanes for a crucial reason.
• Kryptonite bicycle locks are easily broken.
“Things fall apart” is more than a poetic insight—it is a fundamental property of the physical world. Why Things Break explores the fascinating question of what holds things together (for a while), what breaks them apart, and why the answers have a direct bearing on our everyday lives.
When Mark Eberhart was growing up in the 1960s, he learned that splitting an atom leads to a terrible explosion—which prompted him to worry that when he cut into a stick of butter, he would inadvertently unleash a nuclear cataclysm. Years later, as a chemistry professor, he remembered this childhood fear when he began to ponder the fact that we know more about how to split an atom than we do about how a pane of glass breaks.
In Why Things Break, Eberhart leads us on a remarkable and entertaining exploration of all the cracks, clefts, fissures, and faults examined in the field of materials science and the many astonishing discoveries that have been made about everything from the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger to the crashing of your hard drive. Understanding why things break is crucial to modern life on every level, from personal safety to macroeconomics, but as Eberhart reveals here, it is also an area of cutting-edge science that is as provocative as it is illuminating.
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Why can you bend a piece of taffy into all kinds of shapes while a peppermint stick breaks if you push on the middle of it? Why does adding carbon to iron make the resulting metal, steel, stronger, whereas adding sulfur brittles it, making it more liable to break? Eberhart, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, explains the chemistry of metals and other materials to answer these and similar questions. Scientists still have much to learn about how planes of atoms slide over one another when a substance bends, or why impurities can toughen an alloy. In the past, scientists and manufacturers designed new products on a wing and a prayer, hoping that they wouldn't break. The Titanic went down in large part, Eberhart explains, because the iron used in the ship's hull had been made brittle by sulfur, allowing the iceberg to rip through it easily. Today metallurgists have to be able to develop materials with the exact properties needed to avoid another such disaster think of the Challenger or of an airplane breaking up in flight because a tiny crack was exacerbated by increasing and decreasing air pressure. Hydrogen-powered cars are still in the future because hydrogen embrittles most substances it comes into contact with, so new and tougher engines need to be designed to withstand it. Though Eberhard uses many examples from everyday life to illustrate his points, his discussion gets more specialized as the book progresses, making it best for science buffs.
