One of the books I read during my vacation last week is Why Things Break, by Mark E. Eberhart. It is a biographical story of Eberhart’s life work in discovering the quantum chemistry roots of materials fracture. More below the fold:
Eberhart does a great job explaining for the layman (such as me) the relationships of thermodynamics, crystal field theory, atomic topology, grain interface boundaries, and other delicious tidbits. But he also embraces all the people he’s known along the way; mentors, bureaucrats, a generous cop, and many others. The book ranges widely from cynical observations about academic funding to the joy of knowing great scientists.
I was repeatedly struck by how closely the conclusions Eberhart reached in the 21st century parallel those of Theodore Honey, the dysfunctional boffin of Neville Shute’s 1948 novel No Highway, which I also recently (re-) read. Eberhart, being a real scientist nearly 60 years beyond Shute’s fictional one, got rather farther down the road toward understanding the quantum mechanics of fracture but I could easily imagine a conceptual thread.
I enjoyed Eberhart’s description of a scientist:
Dr. Olson – Greg as i now call him – typifies everything wonderful about good scientists. They exude enthusiasm and curiousity. To scientists like Greg, the whole world is a series of puzzles, and their desire to solve them is downright contagious. To many, such scientists seem more like children than responsible adults. Perhaps this is the reason that good university scientists seldom look their age… (p. 59, 60)
Why Things Break begins with Eberhart’s glass marble fracture experiments as a child, his broken kayak in college, trips along the prehistory of materials science (discovering copper in pottery glaze, for instance), and revisits the Titanic disaster repeatedly as an important case of materials’ embrittlement. There’s lots of human psychology to ponder, too, such as why a passenger about to board an Aloha Airlines plane failed to raise any objection to a large crack she noticed in the fusilage (part of the plane ripped off in flight, killing a stewardess).
Another example: why do incandescent light bulbs have a continuous spectrum, and flourescent a discontinuous one? The answer turns out to be rooted the quantum properties of large and small molecules, related to Slater’s observation that the appearance of wave properties in photons are a result of the wavelike properties of the laws of probability. And this, too is fracture-related.
By now you should know if you’d enjoy the book. I found it very entertaining, and I accidentally learned a lot too.