By Sidney Perkowitz
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Customer tags: aerogels(2), chemistry, cosmology, perkowitz, cappuccino, nicolas kurti, physics, beer, foam, pumice, chemists, cosmos
Review & Description
If you think foam is just the froth on your cappuccino or the top of a wave, think again. Foam has implications far beyond the commonplace: It has surprisingly intricate properties that engage scientists around the world. In Universal Foam, physicist and writer Sidney Perkowitz connects the ordinary properties of foam to its deeper scientific meanings. From ocean foam that influences weather around the world, to the revolutionary medicated foam, fibrin sealant, which controls bleeding in trauma victims, to the extraordinary aerogel which will be sprayed into the tail of a comet in 2004 to capture particles and return them to Earth, Perkowitz tells a surprising story of the importance and fascination of foam. Along the way, he explains the origin of the polystyrene peanuts that fill our packages and landfills, and shows the secret of cooking a great souffl and making a perfect cappuccino. Like foam itself, Perkowitz's writing is grounded in serious science, yet effervescent and a delight to the senses. After reading this highly original book, you will never again look at a wave or a galaxy in the same way.A poet might ask for a more exalted image of the cosmos, but physicist Sidney Perkowitz--evidently a committed java junkie as well as a patient explainer of difficult scientific concepts--is quite happy to suggest that the universe resembles a piping-hot cup of milk-laced coffee. It is, he writes, a mixture of solids, liquids, and gases, along with something that partakes of all these states of matter but is different from them as well--namely, foam.
"Foam," writes Perkowitz, "is a surprisingly intricate formation that has impact on astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics"--and that can be only partially explained within the bounds of any one of those fields, requiring a host of disciplines to describe it properly. The foam of the sea, for instance, has extraordinarily complex properties that influence, among other things, global weather systems--and that, if harnessed, may one day yield that magical source of inexhaustibly renewable, inexpensive energy that scientists have long sought. Foam permeates and underlies the cosmos, from subatomic bits of "quantum foam" that "stir up the fundamental shape of the world" to the air-riddled magma that bubbles below planetary surfaces and the foamlike cancellous bones that bear the weight of so many animals, humans included.
You've heard of chaos theory, of butterflies that flap their wings and produce hurricanes. Perkowitz provides an endlessly entertaining introduction to foam theory, a book of popular science to enjoy with an appropriately frothy beverage close at hand. --Gregory McNamee Read more
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