The Magic Furnace: The Search for the Origins of Atoms

Chown begins, as one must, with the Greeks and Democritus who opined, "...in reality there are only atoms and the void." Chown shows how it was impossible for the Greeks without the scientific method to go any further than Democritus's intuition. But Chown does not dwell on the alchemy but ratchets us directly to modern science and the growing realization that "Atoms Are Not the Smallest Things" (Chapter Two), and that therefore "it must be possible to transform an atom of one element into an atom of another." (p. 21)

And with that, the race was on to account for how hydrogen became helium which became, through crucibles unimaginable to man, carbon, iron and eventually the heaviest elements. The story culminates in the work of Fred Hoyle, Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, and Willy Fowler who explained the nuclear processes operating inside stars and supernovae. Chown finishes with a chapter on the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, the "afterglow of creation" which confirmed how helium was manufactured in the Big Bang, and a chapter on how the elements are strewn into space and end up in Population I stars and eventually in our bodies. There is a Glossary and a Selected Bibliography.

The value of this book lies not only in the fascinating story told but in the magical way that Chown is able to painlessly teach us a little chemistry and physics along the way. I learned more about the nature of atoms and the various forces in nature in these pages, almost incidentally, than I have in any other single book. So intrigued was I in learning more that I turned to the Periodic Table of the Elements as I read the text.

But Chown's style is not didactic. Instead he illuminates the personalities and the flow of ideas. We see Marie Currie with her radiation swollen fingers and Fred Hoyle truant at the back of the local cinema teaching himself to read. We see how the vision of meteorites falling into the sun became the vision of the sun falling in upon itself, shrinking and, as the elements got closer and closer together, heating up, and how that idea coursed after some meandering into the discovery of atomic energy. But perhaps the most beautiful "turn" (as in a poetic change of perception, as in a sonnet) in the book is on page 107 where Chown's writes about the sameness of all the atoms of an element, and then suddenly asks, thinking about the mysterious behavior evidenced by the phenomenon of the half-life: "How could radium atoms all be the same yet behave differently?" This question leads to the uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics.

There is an implicit sense of warning in the book about the limitations of humans doing science. Thus the American geologist Thomas Chamberlain is quoted on page 54 as saying, "There is perhaps no beguilement more insidious and dangerous than an elaborate and elegant mathematical process built upon unfortified premises." He was critiquing Lord Kelvin, but might his words not apply to more recent theories, such as that of one-dimensional strings? And on page 65 it is recounted that Auguste Comte "deemed it self-evident that we would never be able to study" the chemical composition of the stars. Two years after his death in 1857 thanks to the unlikely technique of spectroscopy we were doing just that. Indeed, as Chown reports on page 67, helium was discovered on the sun through a reading of its spectrum before it was discovered on the earth! By the way, Chown's material on spectroscopy is fascinating and helped me to a better understanding of how the process works and how the black lines in spectrums of light reveal the composition of the stars.

Chown has the ability to engage the reader in scientific ideas, perhaps in part because of the unique way he sometimes puts things. For example on page 79 he writes about the resistance encountered by an object as it approached the speed of light. He states, "The only conceivable source of such resistance was a body's mass." However, what I thought was, mass cannot find resistance by itself. There must be something in the very fabric of spacetime that is providing the resistance. It is not enough to posit "inertia" since that really explains nothing. I believe there is still something fundamental that we do not understand about the relationship between the speed of light and the nature of matter and energy.

Chown sometimes uses the language and assumptions of the times he is writing about. For example on page 96 he speaks of "the electrons which flitted about an atomic nucleus like planets round the sun," an analogy now considered somewhat misleading (a "cloud" is preferred, I believe), but in recalling it, we are again forced to imagine what an atom might look like if we could somehow "see" it.

Most amusing story: Austrian physicist Fritz Houtermans making up dreams to tell Sigmund Freud! (p. 110)

Best stream of consciousness leading to insight: Fred Hoyle musing on the atomic bomb project about which he had only second-hand and circumstantial evidence. (pp. 159-160)

Best speculation: In answer to "Where are they?", Fermi's famous question about extra-terrestrials, Chown proposes that they came and went long before the sun even shone. (p. 215)
October 29, 2002

I'd recommend it to anyone interested in what we're all actually made of.
August 05, 2002

My favorite account is about Fred Hoyle's pursuit to solve the riddle of how carbon - the stuff of life - was manufactured in the bowls of stars. The problem was that the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen to heavier elements could not bridge the gap from beryllium-8 to carbon-12. But Hoyle knew it had to happen because humans existed!

We are carbon-based beings and Hoyle argued that after two helium-4 atoms fused to beryllium-8, a third helium-4 quickly fused to give carbon-12. He calculated that in the bowls of a red giant star the energies of beryllium-8 and helium-4 matched a resonance energy that produced carbon-12. Tests by Willy Fowler confirmed Hoyle's prediction: carbon-12 has indeed the predicted energy resonance! Never, according to Chown, has an anthropic argument been used to make a scientific prediction.

When you start reading this book, make sure you have no other pressing engagements. You won't want to stop reading. Chown has a wonderful, lucid style.
April 19, 2002