Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life

2018: I re-read this book as part of the Flat Book Society's group read. I don't want to review it twice, so I'm re-posting my original review. My feelings about this book stand, and moreover, it holds up on re-reading very well.

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2017: A pretty excellent book for anyone who gets a bit giddy about science and the everyday ways that science is part of everyone's life.

Czerski has a very accessible voice and a very clear way of explaining what are at times complex topics, and she covers the gamut: electromagnetism, water tension, viscosity, plate tectonics, and Newton's laws of motion (I'm old-school) among them. I learned so much about so many things and those that I had a basic understanding of, she elucidated in ways that really show more brought the concepts to life in better detail. I had no idea that an electromagnet was what held down the tray in my toaster - did y'all know that? That's why the tray doesn't stay down when the toaster is unplugged.

So much of this book got read out loud to MT, who is not a lover of science, but even he found the bits I shared fascinating (he was equally surprised about the toaster), and there were so many suggestions throughout the book that can easily be done at home; I plan to do several of them with my nieces when next they are here - including building our own trebuchet.

Honestly, anyone interested in science but might feel intimidated by the often tedious or complex explanations, or anyone who just thinks the science involved in the every day fascinating will get a lot out of this book. Czerski often gets auto-biographical with her narrative, but she is a physicist, so why wouldn't she use her own experiences to illustrate her points? (For the record, MT and I both think she and her friends got totally screwed on the whole trebuchet debacle.)

Overall, a lot of fun.

PS: oh, yes, the trebuchet will happen! show less

Helen Czerski has long been one of my favourite popular science presenters, due largely to the infectious enthusiasm she beings to her work, and this book begins in very much the same tone. The introduction bubbles with her rapid fire passion for knowledge.


However, if think you might find this ebullience wearing, don't worry. Czerski reins this in to a more academic tone for the book proper without ever becoming dry and, Instead, holds the reader's attention in a fascinating way. In each of the nine chapters she begins by discussing a particular physical phenomenon that refers to real-world experience and skilfully expands it to broader and yet more interesting connected areas.


I found the approach to be engaging and educational. Even show more in areas where, as a long time reader of popular science, Czerski was covering ground with which I was familiar, I was still engaged by her obvious interest and approach, and by anticipation of the direction that her train of thought might lead us. show less

In the author's own words: "this book is about linking the little things we see every day with the big world we live in. It's a romp through the physical world, showing how playing with things like popcorn, coffee stains and refrigerator magnets can shed light on Scott's expeditions, medical tests and solving out future energy needs."

This book is definitely a "romp" through the physical world, managing to be entertaining, energetic, accessible and educational at the same time, without bogging the reader down with too much formal detail, lengthy explanations or equations.

Czerski begins each chapter with something small and familiar that we will have seen many times but may never have thought about, and uses it to explain the relevant show more fascinating physics phenomenon. By the end of each chapter, the reader will see the same patterns explaining some of the most important science and technology of our time. This book provides a good deal of basic general knowledge and shows how physics laws we observe on Earth are applicable universally.

Czerski has a chatty, informal style of writing interspersed with personal anecdotes she usually uses to make a relevant point (which I didn't find as annoying as the ubiquitous author interviews and fashion commentary found in other books). Each chapter covers a theme or physics law (e.g. waves, electromagnetism, surface tension, gravity) and then discusses several useful, common or interesting real-world applications in bite-sized chunks to demonstrate the concept - everything from popcorn, fluorescent scorpions, floating eggs, toast, sloshing tea, bubbles, mail rockets, elephant trunks, steam locomotives, candles, ocean and air currents to Sputnik, the Hubble Telescope, and wi-fi etc. I found her inclusion of experiments that anyone can do at home (e.g. all the egg experiments, the raisins in the fizzy bottle, pH indicator cabbage and the toast experiment) to be a nice addition to a general physics popular science book.

Czerski has an infectious passion for physics. While her explanations aren't terribly detailed; they are accessible, entertaining, understandable, not overly simplified, and extremely fascinating. The examples she chooses are also different - I doubt readers will look at their toasters, tea or eggs in quite the same way again!

I found Storm in a Teacup made for an enjoyable reading experience, providing information that was new to me about how and why ordinary "stuff", and ultimately, the world works.

Other books:

-Science and the City by Laurie Winkless
-Atoms Under the Floorboards by Christ Woodford
-Zoom by Bob Berman
-The Quantum Age by Brian Clegg
-Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down by J.E. Gordon
-Rhythms of Life by Russell Foster & Leon Kreitzman show less

This book made me reminisce about the good old school days, curious to know everything and the joy upon learning some mind-blowing fact about nature and the world.
It felt like sitting in a classroom with a fun science teacher; pure joy. :)

Here I give you a sneak peak of the gamut of topics covered in the book:

● How do plants know top from bottom?
● Why T-rex won't be that scary IRL
● F***in' candles, how do they work?
● The interesting thing about coffee puddles (trust me, there is one)
● Milk and the blue tits (excuse me, I'm talking about the birds)
● Why you might wanna spit in your swimming goggles
● Your trusty towel's sucking action
● Why Ketchup misbehaves when you try to get it on your fries
● What do dogs' show more panting and shaking buildings have in common?
● The reason why Hawaii is the go to place for surfing
● Refraction of ocean waves?!!
● The Arctic exploration adventure with Fram
● Why ducks don't get cold feet (due to an ingenious heat exchanger, courtesy of evolution! )
● Tallest point on the planet (Hint: it's not Mount Everest)
● Flywheels as energy reservoirs
● Bees have electromagnetic vision?!!
● Fickle magnetic poles of the Earth
● The almost science-fiction like story of magnetism of the sea rocks (absolutely loved this part!)

Although the book did get boring at times, for the parts which I already knew, I also really loved her writing style. For example, check out the following excerpt about her life on the ship while researching bubbles in the ocean:

The problem with living on a ship is that you have to live with gravity basically having gone wrong. “Down” becomes an uncertain concept. Things may fall at the same speed and in the same direction as if you’d dropped them on land, but then again, they may not. If you spot a loose object just sitting on a table, you tend to find yourself watching it suspiciously because there is no guarantee that it’s going to stay put. Life at sea is full of elastic bungees, string, rope, sticky grip mats, locked drawers—anything that helps to keep life organized when there’s a capricious force pulling things in unpredictable directions, like a scientific poltergeist.

The book is actually written in a way layman can understand it without being intimidated by scientific jargon and complicated equations, because it uses neither of those. So don't be afraid, go ahead and get your copy soon. ;)

At the end she provided a nice little summary of the three life-support systems: the human body, the Earth, and our civilization. Pretty good way to end a book so varied in its scope to explain the world around us. I think it really tied the book together, and gave a nice sense of perspective.

In conclusion, it will make me look at the world around me with a sense of awe, wonder, and curiosity. I am really grateful for that. :) show less

This is pure science communication, and Czerski is *good* at that. She displays the inner workings of ordinary and fantastic things and explains concepts so well.

I remember cudgeling my brain over katabatic and adiabatic processes in college, staring at two incredibly unhelpful figures in a textbook, trying to interpret them in a way that made sense. Czerski explains them both in about two paragraphs and makes it all clearer than I could get it on my own in those two hours back in college. I was briefly filled with envy that people can read this book and have it that easy.

But that's also kind of my problem with the book. I kept putting it down because she kept telling me things I already knew. And, frustratingly, she'd get to the edge show more of something that I knew would be interesting and probably new to me, and then she'd stop. (Some of the places she stopped were totally inexplicable to me. Who *mentions* the Michelson-Morley experiment and doesn't explain it? How can you skip stuff that cool?) I could admire how well she explained things, but I just wanted her to use her powers of explanation to teach me things I didn't already know. And I was right to want that, because in her chapter on electromagnetism, she covered a lot of things that were new to me, and it was fantastic.

Basically, I'd recommend this to anyone who is interested in science but has some gaps in their knowledge (like mine with electromagnetism), but with the caveat that they should skip the parts they know. Or I'd recommend it to anyone who is just starting out in science, because this book does a great job of showing you how things interrelate and where science concepts can lead you. It's a map for future study! show less

Reading Storm in a Teacup - The Physics of Everyday Life by Helen Czerski is akin to dipping your toe into the world of physics and thankfully Czerski provides a steady hand for the layperson. Czerski looks at everyday occurrences like why a buttered piece of toast will usually fall butter side down when dropped and what happens when you add milk to coffee informs the book's title.

The audiobook was expertly read by Chloe Massey who shares her northern accent with actress Joanne Froggatt - who plays Anna Bates from Downton Abbey - which is to say I loved listening to her narration.

I found many of the topics interesting including how coffee rings develop and why it's hard to get tomato sauce out of the bottle until all of a sudden it show more comes glugging out. I was also curious to learn why pigeons bob their heads when they walk.

The author references a study of pigeons that was undertaken in order to understand why these birds bob their heads forwards and backwards when they walk. When the pigeon was walking on a treadmill, the researcher noticed it wasn't bobbing its head.

"The bird obviously didn't need to do it in order to walk, so it wasn't anything to do with the physics of locomotion. The head bobbing was about what it could see. On the treadmill, even though the pigeon was walking, the surroundings stayed in the same place. If the pigeon held its head still, it saw exactly the same view all the time. That made the surroundings nice and easy to see. But when a pigeon is walking on land, the scenery is constantly changing as it goes past. It turns out, these birds can't see fast enough to catch the changing scene. So they're not really bobbing their heads forwards and backwards at all, they thrust their head forward and then take a step that lets their body catch up and then thrust their head forwards again. The head stays in the same position throughout the step so the pigeon has more time to analyse this scene before moving on to the next one." Chapter 5

Fascinating isn't it? I've been wanting to observe this for myself, but the only pigeon I've seen since finishing this audiobook was asleep. Hopefully I'll have better luck soon.

Coming in at a listening time of 10 hrs and 14 mins, Storm in a Teacup took me a while to get through and when I got to the end and did a stocktake of the notes I'd written in preparation for this review, I noticed pickings were slim.

While I've never been one for physics, I was in safe hands here. Storm in a Teacup - The Physics of Everyday Life by Helen Czerski was a nice jumping off point that held my attention throughout, despite not knowing much about the topics covered.

Czerski's enthusiasm for physics shines through and this was an informative listen. show less

Any book that explains how ducks don’t freeze to death with their bare feet dangling in icy water, I’m all for. Szerski does a great job of segueing from ordinary things to the physics that explains them. I found that she lost her way in later chapters when she wandered into philosophy. Scientists are best off leaving that stuff to the philosophers, I think.