By Nicola Davis
Materials scientist Mark Miodownik’s first book, Stuff Matters, won the 2014 Royal Society book prize. His second, Liquid: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives, has been shortlisted for the 2018 award. He has presented science programmes for the BBC, the most recent of which was the Radio 4 series Plastic Fantastic. He also delivered the prestigious Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 2010 and was appointed an MBE in the 2018 New Year honours list.
You say “liquids are the alter ego of dependable solid stuff”. Did that make them a natural topic for the sequel to your previous book, Stuff Matters? I am doing a project about self-healing roads and I had to deal with tar. Previously I thought it was a solid. And then I realised that it’s a liquid behaving like a solid. And that opened the door to: “What are liquids anyway?”
It’s an interesting question. After all, milk is an emulsion, which is a pretty complex system, and in one experiment it took years for a funnel of pitch to drip. That is what I discovered in writing the book. There is no hard and fast definition of liquids. Previously you may have thought “solids, liquids, gas, everyone knows these are the pillars of science”. That’s absolute rubbish. All states of matter diffuse into each other. It is just a way in your head to archetype certain things so you know what to expect from them. You put a solid somewhere, it stays there, it is not going to walk off. You put a liquid there, it is very likely to disappear, it might go into the gas form, it might go and seep underneath the thing, it might corrode it. That is the other thing I realised writing Liquid: that liquids are kind of a naughty form of matter. They are not to be trusted.
Liquids have astonished us historically, from non-Newtonian fluids like ketchup, which thins when shaken, to the magnetic properties of liquid oxygen. Are we still being amazed? I can see no end to it. There is an infinite range of liquids. There are more and more because what we think of as a liquid can have solid particles in it, it can have other liquids in it, it can be an emulsion, liquid crystals. There are just so many different ways of arranging matter at all the different scales. I talk about liquid computers in the book – the idea that computing in the future might be by liquids because of the immense [information] storage capacity of some molecular species.
There has been a lot of excitement about searching for liquid water on other planets and bodies. Why is it so important? It turns out water has this incredible property – it is a universal solvent. This is because of the polarity of the H2O molecule, which means that charges across the molecule are not evenly distributed, so if you try to dissolve minerals composed of atoms or molecules with an electric charge, such as salt, they easily dissolve in it.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
