Why Things Break

Book #7 was a mostly-fascinating book by chemist/physicist/materials scientist Mark Eberhart. He studies the nature of chemical bonds to better understand why things break - hence the name of his book: Why Things Break: Understanding the World by the Way it Comes Apart.

His book is part memoir, part dive into the depths of chemical bonds, part random history lesson on tools (chapter 2 is a pretty insufferable retelling of ancient man and his trials and tribulations with tools and breakage), part rant on the way money is handed out to research institutes by the federal government, and part retelling of famous "break-downs." The latter was the most interesting, to me, and Dr. Eberhart has a fascinating and lively way of retelling the stories of famous breakages. He talks about the Challenger disaster, the search for unbreakable glass, the development of Pyrex, and so on.

I mentioned that the book was part memoir - part of the book is devoted to detailing the Dr's life and the various places his science has taken him. He started his schooling in Colorado, which he loved. Dr. Eberhart then went to graduate school in Boston for several years and reveals in reminding the reader that he detested it there.

I'm usually not a huge fan of memoir interspersed with my science, especially when the memoir portion is actually just a rant against my hometown. However, despite my usual misgivings about disliking memoir-ish babble in the middle of my science, I have to give some serious credit to this particularly bitter and completely orthogonal personal diatribe in the middle of the book. Before diving in, let me assure you that reading the book will not help you figure out what this passage is doing in his book anymore than reading it stand alone here. However, reading it in context does make it all the more random and bitter - an experience I'm sorry to deprive you of:

Boston in winter is not pleasant. It is gray and cold and wet. Living in Colorado all my life, I had seldom seen freezing drizzle, and I had never seen an ice storm. The ski slopes offered little of the seductive attraction that lured me away from studies in Colorado. On the East Coast, hard-packed means just that - hard. For the first time I experienced real pain from even the most controlled of falls. A "groomed" slope had a local meaning differing from what was understood by western skiers as well. In New Hampshire, "groomed" meant the ice had been broken up into marble- to golf-ball sized chunks. Skiing down these slopes was not unlike driving 60 mph over a severely rutted backcountry dirt road. I kept a clenched jaw for fear of biting my tongue.

For exercise I took up a local sport - snow shoveling. This was also a new experience. Because it is five degrees farther sourth and 5,000 feet higher in elevation, Denver receives a higher intensity of winter sun than does Boston. In Denver the sunlight causes snow to turn directly into vapor, a process called sublimation. ... On a very cold but sunny day in Denver, the snow of the previous night will just disappear. How fast the snow vanishes depends on the amount of snow exposed to direct sun. By shoveling it into piles, the amount of snow exposed to direct sun is reduced and does not sublimate as rapidly. So, except in unusual circumstances, Colorado natives simply ignore the snow and it obliges by going away in a day or two.

This is not the case in Boston, where there is insufficient solar energy to sublime snow or ice. Consequently, during protracted cold spells the snow just lies there, getting packed down into ugly, dirty black stuff that coats sidewalks and roadways, making both walking and driving hazardous. That is, unless it is shoveled into piles, then only these large mounds of snow turn into ugly heaps. The roads and walkways remain at least passable, if not attractive.

I kid you not when I end this with "etc." This goes on for pages. How can you not like a book by a guy who was so miserable in Boston that he happily devotes multiple pages of his very first book to retelling his own personal misery around Boston and its weather?