by Mark Eberhart

When considering the history of human endeavor, specifically the human habit of the crafting and building of things, it is clear that breakage is of critical importance to mankind. We have continued to improve our understanding of how things break and over time, and we have learned how to design our tools and buildings to take account of the breaking habits that the materials we use might possess.

This book proposes that although we have paid great attention to the how, we have only recently begun to ask why things break. Written for the the non-technical reader, this book provides a basic understanding of materials science. Reading this book, you will learn:

• How adding tin to copper creates a metal (bronze) much stronger than either of the two.
• How the Titanic sank because its steel hull was made brittle by the contamination of the iron ore with sulfur (there was also something about an iceberg).
• How Corelleware and Pyrex, when they do break, break in really slivery and sometimes explosive ways.
• How our cars and airplanes are constrained by the material used to travel at only a limited speed.

There's lots of interesting discussion of how chemical bonds create the properties of toughness (think Kevlar) or hardness (think ceramics), but not much discussion of why the chemical bonds work the way they do. The last couple of chapters begin to delve into this area, but that's where my eyes only just started glazing over. This is apparently the puzzle that scientist are currently still trying to solve. If they are successful in unlocking this secret and also are able to apply it to the manufacture of new materials, we will see a revolution in the products we can create and consume.