Month: February 2009

The New Chemistry. Nina Hall, ed. xi + 493 pp. Cambridge University Press

As a teenager, I was given a copy of John C. Slater’s Modern Physics. It would be hard to overstate its influence—it made a scientist out of me. It belonged to a class of very special books that are authoritative despite being popularizations, that are encyclopedic but also report the state of the science, that are conceptually rigorous but are light on equations and avoid jargon. Such books nurture a sense of vocation in budding scientists and are thus invaluable. The New Chemistry, which aspires to showcase the best of contemporary chemistry, may belong on the sparsely populated shelf of books in this class.

By Hervé This

The subject of this meandering and rather appealingly eccentric if always well researched and reasonably well written book is quite fascinating: the actual science of cooking and of taste. What the author argues in the most general of terms across a variety of essays on a range of different gustatory and gastronomic subjects is that science, and specifically chemistry and biology, can be used to explain various aspects of the human sense of taste, along with various culinary behaviors and traditions, and methods of food production.
    Unfortunately, a much too abbreviated and lightweight introduction stands before the first of the extremely interesting case studies that comprise this book,  two of the most compelling of which are “Le Bouillon,” or a history of the art of bouillon making matted against a backdrop of what science now shows us is the optimal way of producing same, or “How Salt Modifies Taste” (the presence of salt enhances our ability to taste sugar, and reduces our sensitivity to tastes that are bitter).

Stephanie Reich, Christian Thomsen, Janine Maultzsch, Carbon Nanotubes. Basic Concepts and Physical Properties, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2004, ISBN 3-527-40386-8, ix + 214 pp.
Günter Schmid, ed., Nanoparticles. From Theory to Application, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2004, ISBN 3_527-30507-6, x + 434 pp.
C. N. R. Rao, Achim Müller, Anthony Cheetham, eds., The Chemistry of Nanomaterials. Synthesis, Properties and Applications, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2 vols., 2004, ISBN 3-527-30686-2, xv + 740 pp.
Michael Köhler, Wolfgang Fritzsche, Nanotechnology. An Introduction to Nanostructuring Techniques, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2004, ISBN 3-527-30750-8, 272 pp.

by Jean Starobinski, translated by Sophie Hawkes
2003, New York, NY, Zone Books, 468 pp., £22.50, ISBN 1 890951 20 X

To focus on semantics, for well chosen terms, provides one with a red thread to follow across intellectual history. This book traces the evolutionary history of two closely related words, ‘action’ and ‘reaction’. It was quite a few years in the making: the text originated in a presidential address to the Modern Language Association (Modern Language Review, 1975, 70, xxi–xxxi), and in his preface, Starobinski recollects how his research on the action/reaction pair started life in meetings of the History of Ideas Club during his three years at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.