Gino Segre - A Matter Of Degrees

 This was a lovely, engaging wee book that manages to make some arcane topics interesting and accessible to the lay reader.  It also gave me a fresh perspective on the world because I’ve never thought about it through such a rigidly temperature focussed lens and it was rewarding! Alongside distance and time, Segre sets up temperature as one of the fundamental modes of human measurement and gives the reader a whirlwind tour of a universe viewed through temperature.

This takes us all around and covers a fairly overwhelming list of topics and subjects including quantum physics, mammalian biology, the steam engine, deep sea diving and everything in between.  The author usually tries to focus on a personality and a discovery in order to break up the technical explanations and give some human interest to the text. But it is the ideas that he covers and the way he links them to philosophical questions about the history and future of humanity and the earth that made the book so interesting for me.  Indeed, even though some of the character sketches and potted histories are really good, there are too many of them and the format is too familiar for one to really stand out.  There is even the odd dud like the story about Einstein’s fridge design, which was curious, but felt off topic.  There were other sections where I wanted a stronger connection to the central theme and a couple where he lost me completely!  But, on the whole, the author’s passion for the subject and his gift for explaining its intricacies make it an enjoyable read.  The sections about photons, neutrinos, thermal vents on the ocean floor, the impact of asteroids, planetary movement, the earth’s temperature history and climate change were all very memorable and excellently explained.  Probably my favourite was a section on how life might have survived a global ice age deep under the sea where life exists using sulphides from thermal vents.

The book is very broad and introductory and sometimes it felt like the scope had been stretched too far or the material was too varied.  On the other hand, it introduced a lot of very interesting topics to me and gave plenty of ideas for further reading so it’s easy to forgive the odd section that rambles or tends towards the tangential.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, similar to ‘Stuff Matters’ by Mark Miodownik but replacing material science with temperature focussed physics!  Both gave me lots of new perspectives, probably partly because my scientific knowledge is shockingly poor, and had the feel of a specialist obsessive assessing a huge breadth of subjects through the narrower lens of their expertise.  Also ordered ‘The First Three Minutes’ by Steven Weinberg because of this book.