Helen CzerskiCritiques

Many thanks for that Blue Machine book on the ocean. The author did an outstanding job of tying the physics and chemistry to the dynamics, the dynamics to the biology, and the biology to values and human impacts. She also included plenty of real world examples of how difficult it is to do research at sea! Dave Walsh

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.

An absolutely thrilling work about the structures and processes of the ocean, and the intricacy of human connectivity to this massive part of our environment. The science is explained well (I could understand it!), and there are plenty of interesting anecdotes to illustrate the points raised.

This book was not really what I was expecting after reading Storm in a Teacup, as this one seemed more in depth and scientific. But it was very well done, keeps your interest, explains the dynamism of the ocean -- it is a true machine. And the machine responds to clues that we are just beginning to understand. Let's hope we make it a priority to figure these clues out before doing things that will forever change the way the ocean, and the earth, work.

This book is great - interesting, accessible, informative. I did not give it the attention it deserves. Instead I mostly half-listened while doing some very boring work. I find Chloe Massey's narration very relaxing and when I say I'd listen to her narrate anything, I'll now use the example of a discussion on egg-spinning. Really though I'd recommend this book and will either read or listen to sections again to get what I should from them.

spiega (senza diagrammi!) cosa sta dietro la fisica

Io e la fisica non siamo mai andati molto d'accordo. All'università il mio "senso fisico" era un predittore abbastanza infallibile, purché lo considerassi come correlazione inversa, nel senso che se tra le possibilità A e B io ritenevo giusta A, allora dovevo usare B per arrivare alla soluzione corretta.
Questo libro mi sarebbe servito parecchio ai tempi: non tanto per imparare le formule - non ce ne sono, nei ringraziamenti Czerski termina menzionando il suo vecchio mentore e sperando che non si lamentasse perché ci sono troppe PAROLE e troppo pochi DIAGRAMMI - quanto per riuscire a vedere le cose in modo più comprensibile. Forse le parole che usa sono sin troppo banali: ma almeno riescono a dare un'idea di base di cosa c'è dietro la fisica, parlando di cose che possiamo vedere accanto a noi. Credo che questo libro sia perfetto per un ragazzo più o meno curioso. La traduzione di Alberto Agliotti è generalmente buona, con un paio di cadute (non stai "a Rhode Island" e l'ingenuity non è l'ingenuità).

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 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.

physicist, principles-of-physics, science, nonfiction, applied-physics****

I first met applied physics in nursing school and knew enough to use it in patient care, but this goes well beyond that and is great fun as well! Welcome to physics in your own world!
Chloe Massey is a fine voice artist and really sounds interested.

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 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!

'Storm in a Teacup' is an accessible guide to Physics, a science that gets complicated very quickly when you have to study it at school and beyond. Czerski's skill is to make sure it never gets too tricky, but focusing on the science of everyday objects - such as how the fact that boiled eggs are solid while raw eggs are liquid inside means that they behave differently when you spin them.

The going is best in the early stages, as there are more areas of Physics for Czerski to explore from her living room or kitchen. This is the 'everyday life' part of the book, but the further we venture into the science, the further we go from the everyday. That's not a problem, per se, but it does mean that you have to pay increasing levels of attention - especially by the time you start reading about electromagnetism. Fortunately the quantum world does not make its presence felt in either tea or milk, so Czerski can leave this part of Physics alone.

The one real weakness of the book is in the writing style. This feels less like a book and more like a written-down Netflix nature documentary. But in a documentary, when the camera cuts from a scene on a beach to a scene ten kilometres under the sea, we have David Attenborough's calm voice guiding us; here, the sudden cut is jolting, and though you know why Czerski is doing it, the technique grates when it's used for the fourth or fifth time in that chapter. We don't need the element of surprise to keep us interested in the topic - the topic is interesting enough not to require such artifice.

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 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.

For some people, science can baffle them, they see it as confusing and the domain of experts and specialists. In some cases, they are right; there are some hideously complicated theories out there that are seeking to explain the finest detail about quarks, string theory and genetics. But it needn’t be that way, science can explain just how the things that we interact with on a daily basis, work. In this, her first book, Czerski takes some well-known items, like eggs, popcorn, ducks, Wi-Fi, magnetism and of course teacups and describes how they work and how they show the inner workings of the physics laws.

As an introduction to physics and science it is a great little book. Czerski has a chatty style of writing as she tell us about the various subjects, whilst unobtrusively slipping the science in under the radar. For me it is a bit too general in scope, I tend to prefer more specific books, but by making science interesting, and more importantly accessible, this book will appeal even to those that rarely venture into the world of science. 3.5 Stars

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 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

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' 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. :)

Excellent book that was both accessible and interesting. She was one of those scientists whose genuine enthusiasm for science and the world shows throughout her work, which makes it such a pleasure to read.

A viúva Hegarty, vendedora de sorvetes, mora em uma fictícia vila da costa oeste escocesa, Baikie, de compleição e moral provincianas. Tem como única companheira a cadela Patsy, mas depois que ela deixa de pagar uma taxa anual de licenciamento canino, o prefeito de Baikie, William Gow, ordena que o animal seja despachado, incitando assim a tempestade do título. A peça (Tempestade em Chávena de Chá) foi extraída de outra peça, "Storm Over Patsy", escrita em 1930 pelo alemão expatriado para os Estados Unidos Bruno Frank, que se estabeleceu em Hollywood como roteirista. Foi reformulada para a Broadway pelo escocês James Bridie e fez sucesso durante 1936 e 1937. Imagine uma comédia dos estúdios Ealing com um toque à Frank Capra.

I had never heard of Helen Czerski before, but it seems she may be Britain’s answer to Michio Kanu. She explains physics in what should be very easy to understand language, but I still got only part of it. However, what I got made me feel proud to have expanded my brain a centimeter or so.

I received this from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Interesting in a nerdy sort of way. Probably only interesting to those interested in the background science of everyday things.

She explained everyday things using physics in a way that was entertaining and easy to understand.