How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang - Softcover

Cliff, Harry

 
9780593414316: How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593414314 ISBN 13: 9780593414316
Verlag: Random House Large Print, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

NAMED A BEST SCIENCE BOOK OF 2021 BY KIRKUS * An acclaimed experimental physicist at CERN takes you on an exhilarating search for the most basic building blocks of our universe, and the dramatic quest to unlock their cosmic origins.  "A fascinating exploration of how we learned what matter really is, and the journey matter takes from the Big Bang, through exploding stars, ultimately to you and me." (Sean Carroll)
 
Carl Sagan once quipped, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” But finding the ultimate recipe for apple pie means answering some big questions: What is matter really made of? How did it escape annihilation in the fearsome heat of the Big Bang? And will we ever be able to understand the very first moments of our universe?
 
In How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch, Harry Cliff—a University of Cambridge particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider—sets out in pursuit of answers. He ventures to the largest underground research facility in the world, deep beneath Italy's Gran Sasso mountains, where scientists gaze into the heart of the Sun using the most elusive of particles, the ghostly neutrino. He visits CERN in Switzerland to explore the "Antimatter Factory," where the stuff of science fiction is manufactured daily (and we're close to knowing whether it falls up). And he reveals what the latest data from the Large Hadron Collider may be telling us about the fundamental nature of matter.
 
Along the way, Cliff illuminates the history of physics, chemistry, and astronomy that brought us to our present understanding—and misunderstandings—of the world, while offering readers a front-row seat to one of the most dramatic intellectual journeys human beings have ever embarked on.
 
A transfixing deep dive into the origins of our world, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch examines not just the makeup of our universe, but the awe-inspiring, improbable fact that it exists at all.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HARRY CLIFF is a particle physicist based at the University of Cambridge and a curator at the Science Museum, London. He regularly gives public lectures and makes TV and radio appearances. His 2015 TED talk "Have We Reached The End Of Physics?" has been viewed over 2.5 million times.

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Chapter 1

Elementary Cooking

One summer afternoon, I arrived at my parents’ house in suburban southeast London armed with some glassware that I’d ordered online and a pack of six Mr. Kipling Bramley apple pies. I was there to do what is probably the silliest experiment I’ve ever attempted.

As a child, my dad was a keen amateur chemist and used to spend happy afternoons in the mid-­1960s creating smells and explosions in the shed at the bottom of his parents’ garden. Those were the days when anyone (including teenage boys in possession of an advanced knowledge of chemistry and a healthy disregard for their own safety) could buy a terrifying array of noxious substances from their local chemical supplier. This, it turned out, included all the ingredients of gunpowder. He still recalls with some relish how one of his more dramatic experiments was brought to an abrupt end when his own father, a former artilleryman not unaccustomed to the sound of gunfire, stormed to the bottom of the garden shouting, “That’s enough, that one rattled the windows!” Simpler times. My dad still has some of his old chemistry equipment, including a Bunsen burner that I wanted to get my hands on, and I’d decided that my small London flat was probably not the ideal location for the experiment I had in mind.

The thought behind the experiment was this: if you were presented with an apple pie and had no knowledge of pies, apples, or their composition, what might you do to try to figure out what it was made from? On the workbench in the garage I scraped a small sample of the pie into a test tube, taking care to get a good mix of the crumbly pastry and the soft apple filling, and then sealed it with a cork with a small hole drilled through the middle. After connecting the tube to a second flask floating in a tub of cold water via a long L-­shaped glass pipe, we fired up the Bunsen burner, popped it under the test tube, and stood back.

The pie began to bubble and caramelize, and soon the expanding gas within the test tube threatened to force our sample up into the connecting pipe. Reducing the heat slightly we watched the pie slowly start to blacken, and to my delight tendrils of mist started to flow along the pipe and pour into the waiting flask, which before long was overflowing with a ghostly white vapor. Now this was a real chemistry experiment!

Wondering what this white mist might be, I gave it a whiff, a tried and tested method of chemical analysis from before the days of health and safety. Humphry Davy, a pioneering chemist of the Romantic age, famously investigated the medical effects of various gases by inhaling them, which in 1799 led him to discover the pleasurable effects of nitrous oxide, what we now know as laughing gas, which he would inhale in large quantities while locked in a dark room with his poet friends, or sometimes young women of his acquaintance. Mind you, it wasn’t a risk-­free strategy. He came close to killing himself during an experiment with carbon monoxide, and on being dragged into the open air remarked faintly, “I do not think I shall die.”

Alas, my apple pie vapor didn’t produce any psychoactive effects, just an extremely unpleasant burnt smell that seemed to hang around for hours afterward. Peering through the mist to the bottom of the flask I found that some parts of the vapor had condensed on contact with the cool water bath, forming a yellowish liquid covered by a dark brown oily film.

After about ten minutes of intense heating, no more vapor seemed to be coming off the charred remains of the apple pie and so we concluded that our experiment was complete. In my keenness to inspect the contents of the test tube, I briefly forgot that when you heat glass with a Bunsen flame for ten minutes it gets really quite hot and badly burned my index finger. There’s a good reason why the most dangerous bit of equipment I am generally allowed near is a desktop computer.

After a much longer wait, I gingerly returned to the test tube and tipped its contents onto the bench. The apple pie had been reduced to a jet-­black, rocklike substance whose surface was slightly shiny in places. So what can we conclude about the composition of apple pie from this admittedly rather silly experiment? Well, we’ve ended up with three different substances: a black solid, a yellow liquid, and a white gas, which by now had infused my skin, hair, and clothes with a nauseating burnt smell. I admit that the precise chemical composition of these three apple pie components was not entirely clear to me at the time, though I was pretty sure the black stuff was charcoal and that the yellowish liquid was probably mostly water. To get further toward a list of fundamental apple pie ingredients we are going to need to do some more advanced chemical analysis.

The Elements

I shouldn’t admit this as a physicist, but chemistry was my favorite subject at school. Physics labs were sterile, joyless places where we were expected to find excitement wiring up a circuit or glumly timing the swing of a pendulum. But the chemistry lab was a place of magic, where you could play with flame and acid, set fire to magnesium ribbon that burned so bright it dazzled, or bubble colored potions through delicate glassware. The safety glasses, the bottles of sodium hydroxide with threatening orange warning labels, and white lab coats stained with the unidentified, perhaps toxic, remains of experiments past, all helped to lend the chemistry lab a frisson of danger. And marshaling all this was our enigmatic teacher, Mr. Turner, who arrived at school in a sports car and was rumored to have made his fortune by inventing the spray-­on condom.

In fact, it was a fascination with chemistry that set me on a path toward eventually becoming a particle physicist. Chemistry, like particle physics, concerns itself with matter, the stuff of the world, and how different basic ingredients react, break apart, or change their properties according to certain rules. The reason I didn’t stick with chemistry in the end is because I wanted to know where those rules came from. Had I been born in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, I would most likely have stuck with it. Back then, if you wanted to understand the fundamental building blocks of matter, then chemistry, not physics, was the subject for you.

The person who probably did more than anyone else to invent modern chemistry was Antoine-­Laurent Lavoisier, a brash, ambitious, and fabulously rich young Frenchman who lived and worked in the second half of the eighteenth century. Born in Paris in 1743 into a wealthy family steeped in the legal profession, he used a large inheritance from his father to equip his personal lab at the Paris Arsenal with the most sophisticated chemical apparatus money could buy. Aided by his wife and fellow chemist, Marie-­Anne Pierrette Paulze, he brought about a self-­declared “revolution” in chemistry by systematically dismantling the old ideas that had been inherited from ancient Greece and inventing the modern concept of the chemical element.

The idea that everything in the material world is made up of a number of basic substances, or elements, has been around for thousands of years. Different element theories can be found in ancient civilizations including Egypt, India, China, and Tibet. The ancient Greeks argued that the material world was made of four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. However, there is a big difference between what the ancient Greeks thought of as an element and the definition of a chemical element that we learn about in high school.

In modern chemistry, an element is a substance like carbon, iron, or gold that can’t be broken down or converted into anything else....

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Verlag
Random House Large Print
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593414314
ISBN 13 
9780593414316
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
558
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9
Plovdiv
Bulgarien

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