New York Times Review of Caesars Last Breath
Due west e are creatures of low-cal and air. Life's a gas, in every sense. We are oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, packed together with the carbon that photosynthesising life has plucked, one molecule at a time, from the temper in the course of carbon dioxide. At cremation, our bodies bake down to a handful of minerals. When Hamlet beseeched his too, as well solid flesh to melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew, he got information technology about right: the Prince of Denmark would have been about 70% water, which is itself an atmospheric vapour. And he certainly could have been blown away.
Harry Truman – "not that Harry Truman", every bit Sam Kean says in this bright and breezy book – was diddled away past Mount St Helens. Truman was the defiant man who dismissed the warnings of volcanologists and refused to exit the high slopes of America's most violent modern volcano earlier it erupted in May 1980. Kean reconstructs his death because, equally a chemist, he knows the temperatures at which water, viscera and bones could vaporise equally a blackness cloud of intense heat, 100 storeys high and 10 miles wide, came roaring down the mountain at 350mph: "Truman's clothes would have flared and disappeared, and so Truman himself would have sublimed in the scientific sense – transformed from solid to spirit well-nigh instantly. And with a final hiss, he would take risen upward into the air."
Every bit Kean says, there'due south a chance that your last breath contained just the tiniest whiff of the late Harry Truman, just as information technology quite possibly contains a remnant of the air exhaled past Julius Caesar every bit he cried "Et tu, Brute," and expired. The atmosphere is vast, but then is the number of atoms and molecules inhaled with each breath: the number of lungfuls in the air and atoms in each lungful run to the billion trillions and more than or less match. So each inhalation is also likely to contain the concluding wheeze of a dying tyrannosaurus 70m years agone; and the breath exhaled past Marc Bolan of T Rex as he sang "Life's a Gas", or by Joey Ramone of the Ramones (who wrote a different song of the aforementioned title).
Our planet is for the moment an ideal domicile, solar-powered, air-conditioned, fitted with hot and cold running water and underfloor primal heating, but it is the atmosphere that provides the currency with which life pays its fashion. This book starts with a blood-soaked toga and the conceit of Caesar'south last gasp, but it does truly have an epic story to tell, and Kean takes us at a amble right through the entire iv.5bn yr saga, from the moment of planetary assembly, mostly from interstellar gas molecules, to the cluttered challenge of planetary weather, the sorry one-act of flying saucers at Roswell and the even more than mournful tale of humanoid survivors from spaceship Globe – should there be any – in search of another habitable planet a dozen low-cal years away.
Earth'due south showtime atmosphere during the Hadean period tin hardly have been promising: the steamy magmatic exhalations would have been at pressures high enough to crush a man skull, but they cooled to condense into sea. Earth was also hitting by another space object big enough to tilt information technology off its centrality, and give it a companion moon: the same standoff, says Kean "non only ejected our atmosphere, information technology may well accept boiled our frickin' oceans".
Let's get this bit out of the way: at times, Kean takes his admirable conversational tone in directions not always familiar to those brought up on the measured language of Thomas Henry Huxley, Richard Dawkins or Nigel Calder. Then in an bated, the same Harry Truman "woke upward in the snow in his tighty-whities"; the pharmacist Fritz Haber "developed one helluva trounce" on the Kaiser; Humphry Davy tried "chugging a bottle of wine equally fast equally possible"; Alfred Nobel spilt some "nitro onto a pile of kieselguhr like a klutz" and so on.
More than awkwardly, the whole story – serious science all the mode – is told in measurements of miles, pounds and Fahrenheit, rather than the metric units now universal in science.
Inevitably, some of it is familiar: who could talk most oxygen without invoking Joseph Priestley, or Lavoisier; nitrogen without mentioning Haber, or nitrous oxide without Davy? The numbers, too, are numbing: we don't recollect in septillions but that'south the traffic in oxygen molecules consumed by a human in 24 hours in the course of powering muscle movement. The poisonous gas hydrogen sulphide, for case, makes up a vanishingly pocket-sized component of the air, but yous gulp 60m molecules every iv seconds. You never recall about the noble gases, but every four seconds yous breathe in – and exhale out – 20 quadrillion molecules of helium and 100 quintillion of argon.
The narrative embraces not just the nature of air but the scenic qualities of some of its gases, and their connection with human history, so there are enjoyable detours into the story of guano that – before the Haber-Bosch process – supplied the nitrogen that fuelled 20th-century food supply; and into the grim deaths at Lake Nyos, Cameroon, which in 1986 foamed like soda water, with mortiferous levels of carbon dioxide that killed one,746 people. "Survivors remember an eerie stillness for days afterward. At that place weren't even flies around to snack on the dead bodies."
This airy adventure bobs along with the first balloonists; the atmospheric link between the collapse of the Tay Span and the fame of William McGonagall, that enduring disaster of a poet; the improbable spontaneous combustion of Mr Krook in Dickens'southward Dour Business firm; the vacuum pumps and steam machinery of Newcomen and Watt and the explosive value of gunpowder, nitroglycerin and dynamite (all of which release gases, very suddenly, and with great force). Nosotros see Joseph Pujol, aka Le Pétomane, the Parisian performer of evocative farts. Albert Einstein makes an advent as a fridge designer; the nuclear force locked in atomic affair pops up even more forcefully with the atmospheric weapons tests in the Pacific. The overarching story is instructive, told lightly and with stride.
Kean thoughtfully packs even more digressions into his endnotes. My favourite nominates the 832°F temperature at which brimstone (hell has a lake of it, according to the Revelation of St John the Divine 21:8) remains liquid; and then takes the temperature of heaven (Isaiah 30:26 seems to say the sun shines sevenfold as the light of seven days). Temperature increases as the quaternary ability of sunlight, so with 49 suns heaven would savour a temperature of 1,000°F and therefore be hotter than hell. It'due south a helluva read. And information technology'southward a gas.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/caesars-last-breath-sam-kean-review
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