It's a Gas
The Sublime and Elusive Elements That Expand Our World
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- 14,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
The New York Times bestselling author of Stuff Matters presents a rollicking guided tour of the secret lives of gases: the magnificent, strange, and fascinating substances that shape our world.
Gases are all around us—they fill our lungs, power our movement, create stars, and warm our atmosphere. Often invisible and sometimes odorless, these ubiquitous substances are also the least understood materials in our world, and always have been.
It wasn’t long ago that gases were seen as the work of ancient spirits: the sudden closing of a door after a change in airflow signaled a ghost’s presence. Scientists and engineers have struggled with their own gaseous demons. The development of high-pressure steam power in the eighteenth century literally blew away some researchers, ushering in a new era for both safety regulations and mass transit. And carbon dioxide, that noxious by-product of fossil fuel consumption, gave rise to modern civilization. Its warming properties known for centuries, it now spells ruin for our fragile atmosphere.
In It’s a Gas, bestselling materials scientist Mark Miodownik chronicles twelve gases and technologies that shaped human history. From hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and neon to laughing gas, steam, and even wind, the story of gases is the story of the space where science and belief collide, and of the elusive limits of human understanding.
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In this captivating study, Miodownik (Stuff Matters), a materials scientist at University College London, examines how gases and the inventions that utilize them have shaped human civilization. He notes that though nitrogen constitutes 78% of air, it remained difficult to "harvest" until the early 1900s when German chemist Fritz Haber realized that hydrogen reactions could draw nitrogen out of the air; because crops require nitrogen-rich soil, Haber's breakthrough led to the production of fertilizers that boosted crop yields worldwide. Surveying the many uses of the "humble air valve," Miodownik explains how its incorporation into brass instruments in the early 1800s enabled the instruments to vary pitch for the first time, and how its use in rubber wheels transformed bicycles from clunky wood and steel contraptions into a viable form of personal transportation. Elsewhere, Miodownik covers how CO2's heat-trapping qualities are driving sea level rise, how the proliferation of cyanobacteria 2.4 billion years ago generated the oxygen-rich atmosphere later organisms came to depend on, and how large-scale differences in air temperature and air pressure produce wind. Miodownik combines a specialist's erudition with a generalist's broad scope, producing an expansive inquiry that bounds from human history to natural science and climate research without missing a beat. It's an exemplary work of pop science. Photos.
