Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)As dull as dust, you might think, until you read a fascinating and wide-ranging science account, _The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things_ ((John Wiley & Sons) by Hannah Holmes, and realize that dust is certainly universal, and is often a nuisance, but it is also a basic cosmic building block. It is hard to imagine any facet of dust that Holmes has not covered in remarkable detail. House dust is here, of course. Everyone carries around a personal cloud of dust, made of skin cells and clothes fibers, but mostly composed of unknowns. Some of this turns into house dust, which has a surprising complex ecology of fungi and dust mites which feed upon it, and tiny, fierce pseudoscorpions that feed upon the mites. But thinking of dust as some domestic phenomenon is a bit parochial. Try thinking cosmic. Holmes goes back to the Big Bang, which scattered matter all over, in unimaginably thin concentrations. The dust grains gathered, and formed places for atoms to meet and make molecules. That made the sun, the earth, and of course, us. Space dust is therefore of increasing interest to cosmologists, the target now of various probes that are supposed to gather the dust out there and bring it home uncontaminated.
It has become alarmingly clear that dust pays little attention to national boundaries. Oriental countries have had booming technologies run mostly on coal for electricity and diesel for transport. In China, one out of fourteen deaths is due to noxious dusts, and its crops are flagging because they don't get as much sun as they used to. It is only recently that we have discovered that the problem dusts of Asia are our problem, too. The Asian Express makes regular deliveries of Gobi Desert and industrial dusts to the American northeast. The Sahara desert sends its dusts to the eastern US about three times a summer, maybe with bacteria. And the US dusts go to other countries, and it is all one big swaparound. There are rivers of dust in the air, rivers that have flowed since long before we knew of any such things. They are now bigger because of drought and land abuse, and now they carry a freight of DDT, PCBs, and other pollutants that we magnanimously thought we were only dumping onto our own national soils. We at least know now that if we are going to protect countries from poisonous dusts, we are going to have to have a global program to do so, but whether that knowledge will actually inspire such a program is not at all clear.
In an amusing last chapter, Holmes emphasizes that to dust we shall return. She summarizes the efforts of the arts of the embalmer and casketmaker only to show that dust is our destiny no matter what. Some of us will rush the job, being burned into ash quickly after death. It is all well and good for family members to scatter that dust in a garden or at sea, but not too terribly imaginative. For a fee, various companies will turn that dust into keepsake brooches, duck decoys, bowling balls, fireworks, or fishing rods. It doesn't make any ultimate difference. The sun is getting hotter every day, and will eventually turn to hot dust all living things on our planet, and then Earth itself will get sucked into the maw of the red-giant sun, finally to become dust again. Well, take heart. That people can pull together this many interesting facts and stories about mere dust is one of the things that means that the ride between beginning dust and final dust is intrinsically worth taking.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things
0 comments:
Post a Comment