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The Magic Furnace: The Search for the Origins of Atoms

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The title is an allusion to the dream of the alchemists of old who sought a magic kiln in which to transform base metals into gold. That dream remained intact until the discovery in the twentieth century of how the elements are actually built up from hydrogen and exactly what kind of "magic furnace" would be required to turn base metals into gold. In a most engaging narrative, science writer Marcus Chown tells that fascinating story through the lives and ideas of the scientists who made the discoveries.

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)

I have owned a copy of this book for some time before I got around to reading. And when I did I could not put it down. Marcus Chown spins an enthralling historical account of how we learned about the cosmic synthesis of elements.

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.

Marcus Chown is an incredibly gifted author. He somehow manages to impart (what could otherwise have been hard boring facts) into a compelling and passionate account of man's unquenchable thirst for knowledge - and in particular the search for the atom. From the very first page, the reader is gripped and taken on an incredible journey, back through time as we follow early scientists in their sometimes heartbreaking endeavours to discover the atom. Marcus Chown has the ability to make science appealing and enormously exciting. Readers will not be intimidated (nor patronised) by the subject matter, instead they will be left wanting more. This book lends itself brilliantly to either a television documentary or indeed a drama serialisation where it can reach an even wider audience. More please, Mr. Chown!

By convention there is sweetness, by convention there is bitterness, by convention hot and cold, by convention color. But in reality there are [only] atoms and the void.--Democritus (c. 460 - c. 370 B.C.)

The Greek philosopher Democritus was not a scientist, but he was on the right track. His prescient idea of atomism--which postulated a cosmos made up of hard, indivisible (hence atomic, from the Greek a-toma, "uncuttable") particles of matter moving through empty space--anticipated the road modern physics would travel.

We now know (witness Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that atoms are not indivisible; they can be split, and in the process can release enormous bursts of stored-up energy. Also, our present models of atoms reveal them to be miniature "solar systems" (electrons orbiting a central nucleus made of protons and neutrons).

But what exactly are atoms and where did they come from? Were they created in the inferno of the Big Bang some 15 billion years ago? Were they produced (and are they still being produced) in the interior of stars? Could super-dense and super-hot supernovae, which first implode and then explode with mind-boggling force, be "the magic furnace" in which atoms are created?

"Every breath you take," writes Marcus Chown, "contains atoms forged in the blistering furnaces deep inside stars. Every flower you pick contains atoms blasted into space by stellar explosions that blazed brighter than a billion suns. Every book you read contains atoms blown across unimaginable gulfs of space and time by the wind between the stars."

The Magic Furnace is the work of a literary alchemist who tranmutes the iron of complexity into the gold of lucidity. Chown's wizardry translates baffling mysteries of physics into concepts comprehensible to non-specialists. Fascinating as a detective story, the author's crystal-clear narrative allows us to follow, step by step, the unfolding story of how scientists came to understand atoms and the cosmos.

One of the strongest features of this book is Chown's mastery of transitions. Moving smoothly from one part of the story to the next, he weaves a seamless garment that avoids unseemly gaps and unsightly tears.

Throughout this work, Chown scatters fascinating anecdotes about science and scientists, taking us into the mental workshops of some of the great minds of our time. And the best news is that one need not be an Einstein to applaud when an innovative thinker has an "Aha!" moment.

I suppose everyone has heard that we are star dust, that we were born in the stars, but did you ever stop to wonder---is this really true? How did scientists ever find this out? How did they prove it? Magic Furnace will tell you how--in a most delightful way. In this book I learned that a great scientist can make a real wild guess at a solution to a problem, later find out it was largely wrong, yet even so, a part of his guess could lead to fruitful advances in the search for truth. Chown has that magic touch, the ability to tell a complex scientific story in conversational language. Should be required reading for every science student!

This book is just completely the most incredible science book I have ever read. I could not put it down, and believe me, I can put down a LOT of books that other people say they can't put down. Totally inspiring, exciting. It's not like reading a book, it's like travelling in a time machine. You're not reading about the discovery of the electron, you're there in that dark laboratory with J.J. Thomson and his glowing cathode ray tubes.

"It often happens that the mind of a person who is learning a new science, has to pass through all the phases which the science itself has exhibited in its historical evolution." (Stanislao Cannizzaro, Italian chemist, 1826 - 1910).

Marcus Chown, cosmology consultant to "New Scientist" recapitulates the discovery of the elements and the building blocks of these elements in a remarkably lucid account that zooms from the smallest to the largest scale of our Universe. Scientific breakthroughs such as Hoyle's brash prediction of the 7.65 MeV energy state of Carbon-12, or for that matter the prediction of the existence of atoms by Greek philosopher, Democritus are the historical building blocks of "The Magic Furnace."

The fire in the `Furnace' is the actual creation of the elements. Chown takes his readers on a journey back to the beginning of our Universe where hydrogen and helium were born in inconceivable fury. How these elements are transmuted into the rest of the periodic table was a puzzle that 20th Century scientists couldn't begin to solve until the atom was broken down into its constituent parts.

This challenge leads to one of the author's most interesting biographical portraits: who is the only scientist to date who has "made a successful prediction from an anthropic argument in advance of an experiment?"

It was astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, who challenged nuclear physicists to prove that there was an energy state of carbon-12 very close to 7.65 MeV. Without this precise energy state of carbon, the creation of elements heavier than beryllium seemed to be impossible. Yet, they existed.

Of course, Hoyle and the nuclear physicists did collaborate, and the rest is history, plus a round of Nobel Prizes and a knighthood. I was fascinated to learn of Sir Fred's many discoveries concerning the creation of the heavier elements, especially since this astronomer's reputation became somewhat tarnished in the latter decades of the 20th Century.

"The Magic Furnace" teaches the basics of astronomy, chemistry, and nuclear physics in such a clear and interesting fashion that it should be tarted up with photographs and diagrams, and used in place of textbooks that don't give students nearly such a coherent and exciting view into the workings of our Universe.

Probably the clearest exposition of the history of modern nuclear physics. In addition, he ponders some of the great philisophical questions in a realistic way.

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

The story of how Fred Hoyle predicted that Carbon would have a certain resonance is already an amazing story. But the version I had heard before was not nearly as interesting as Chown's version. I literally could not put the book down. For example, Fred Hoyle was visiting Cal Tech when he asked the experimental physicists there if there could be such a resonance. The physicists first of all discussed how they could have missed this resonance if it existed, and luckily for Hoyle they found a loop hole in quantum mechanics whereby they might have missed it. So then they looked for it and Hoyle held his breath for 10 days and yes, the resonance was there. The physicist who went out on a limb and gave Hoyle the benefit of the doubt and took his suggestion seriously was rightly rewarded with a Nobel prize.

Another fun book by Marcus Chown, the Magic Furnace brings the physics of chemistry to life for the interested amateur. By reviewing the history of the discovery of atoms and of atomic particles and of the origin of the elements, the author actually presents the intellectual inheritance of mankind and illustrates how our current understanding of the universe has come about by the combined efforts of hundreds of individuals over millennia. As Newton once said, "If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." This statement might well be said of our own time as well. Much of what we know and of what technology we enjoy has arisen through the insights and contributions of generations of those before us.

The book would make a splendid text for high school students since, without delving into the complicated mathematics of physics, the book presents the scientific method at its best, brings the intellectual contributions of scientists of the past to the attention of the student and gives an appreciation of what science can contribute to our understanding of what is. It might capture the attention and appreciation of young people before they decide that science is "too hard" or "too boring" to bother with. It will certainly give the interested reader a better handle on how the cosmos came to be as it is and an appreciation of what scientists do for us.