Middle World: The restless heart of matter and life

Welcome to the website for the book Middle World: the restless heart of matter and life by Mark Haw. This is a book about the little-known but vitally important way matter behaves on a scale bigger than atoms but smaller than 'macroscopic' things like grains of sand. Matter in the middle world in other words.

On the morning of June 12th 1827, in a house on the corner of Soho Square, central London, a Scots botanist made a discovery that would eventually change our understanding of matter and life. That botanist, Robert Brown, originally intending to study plant pollination, ended up seeing into the heart of matterÑand observing one of the secrets of life. So what connects pollen, plastics, proteins, DNA, time, entropy, atoms, Einstein, a suicide in an Italian hotel, a scandalous Parisian affair, nanotechnology, rice pudding, and global stock markets? The answer lies in the 'middle world': where matter on a microscopic middle scale, bigger than atoms, smaller than everyday visible objects, is caught in a strange restless dance. That peculiar dance of middle world matter, as first investigated by Robert Brown that summer of 1827, is vital in understanding everything from washing up liquid to proteins. And it may even hold a clue to the daddy of scientific questions: the origin of life.

Middle World is published by Macmillan. On this site you can find reviews, news of upcoming events, various links--and more on what middle world science tells us about matter, energy and life.

Nominated for the Times Higher Young Academic Author award 2007.

"A delightful story of an overlooked and underappreciated science... the writing never falters..." Mark Buchanan, author of Ubiquity

"Mark Haw is to be congratulated on this remarkable book. It opens up a treasure chest of forgotten science that has shaped life on Earth..." John Emsley, author of Elements of Murder

"An accessible and racy account -- there is something for everyone in this highly enjoyable little book" Nature

"Haw writes in a fast-paced, witty, staccato style, studding his account with vignettes of the great minds who, in the span of a few decades, flung science into the modern era. He does a particularly good job of helping readers swallow great chunks of chemistry and physics without the mental indigestion that usually goes along with such a feast..." American Scientist

"...this one slim book manages to begin with a simple, curious observation in 1827 and ends up synthesizing many of the major ideas of modern physics, chemistry, and biology...It's a phenomenal book" Pharyngula science blog

Read the first page of Middle World at MacmillanScienceBookstore

Buy Middle World online from any of these stores:

Amazon UK
Waterstones UK
Amazon.com
BarnesandNoble.com
Macmillan Science

New! Download Middle World as an eBook:

MacmillanScienceBookstore

Reviews and comments

"A delightful story of an overlooked and underappreciated science and the scientists who made it. Haw weaves together science history with modern research into a colourful picture of the noisy, chaotic realm in which biology finds its mechanical foundation. The writing never falters: a fine balance between instructive metaphor, accurate detail, and amusing anecdote." Mark Buchanan, author of Nexus, Small World, Ubiquity etc

"Mark Haw is to be congratulated on this remarkable book. It opens up a treasure chest of forgotten science that has shaped life on Earth and which is going to play a major role this century." John Emsley, writer, broadcaster, and author of Vanity, Vitality and Virility, and Elements of Murder

"There have been numerous books published in the past few years on nanotechnology and the history of science... Middle World is certainly one of the most readable of these... a riveting story that started with a botanist called Brown..." Chemistry World (see The incessant dance or my blog for the complete review)

"...a nice job of bringing together the historical story, the relevance of Brownian motion to current science in areas like biophysics and soft matter physics, and its future importance in nanotechnology..." Richard Jones, nanotechnologist and author of Soft Machines (see Richard's blog for more)

Readers who speak Portuguese may like to have a look at this review from Brazil's globo site. Alternatively here is Google's charming attempt at translation...: "The books of scientific spreading for there are not many that they obtain to start with a scene to la 'Brave Heart'. Only therefore the 'Middle World' of the British physicist Mark Haw, already would be a positive surprise, but the qualities of the workmanship go beyond this unsupicious epic side. 'Middle World'... brings to the scene almost all the great physicists of history and its attempt of desvender the browniano movement, one of the most important phenomena ... of the microscopical scale... 'Movement what!?', the reader would ask..." Hmm!

For what it's worth, Middle World also gets likened to Dava Sobel's Longitude in a recent BBC Focus review by Robert Matthews... Hmm x 2!

Forthcoming events

I will be giving numerous talks about Middle World in 2007. More will be added to the list here as and when confirmed... or keep an eye on the 'Events' page at Macmillan Science.

Current dates:

Royal Institution: Wed 28th February, 7 pm
(co-hosted by the National Physical Laboratory)
Waterstones Nottingham: Thurs 8th March, 7.30 pm
Culham Science Centre: Wed 28th March, 2 pm
York Cafe Scientifique: Wed 4th July, 7.30pm
Oxford Cafe Scientifique: Tues 10th July, 7.00pm
Brighton Cafe Scientifique: Tues 17th July, 7.00pm

About the author

As well as science writing I teach and research in the School of Chemical, Environmental and Mining Engineering at the University of Nottingham. For the last ten years or so my research has concentrated on the field of Brownian motion and 'middle world matter', at the University of Edinburgh and at the Ecole des Mines in France. I have written numerous news stories and features for the journal Nature and its website, as well as Chemistry World and Physics World. I also write short stories and novels--but that, quite literally, is another story...

If you have any comments about this page or queries about the book or my other writing, feel free to contact me by email at 'info' followed by '@middle-world.com'.

Blogs

See From the restless middle world for my blog on science, writing, and science writing...
Or see FirstScience for another science blog I contribute to.

Articles

See Physics World for my article concentrating on Einstein's role in the story of Brownian motion and the middle world. Or see below for another version of the story...
Here is my recent article on curiosity amongst scientists and novelists, written for the lablit online magazine.

Press coverage and appearances

Click this link for a Telegraph Connected article on Brownian motion.
Here is a transcript of an interview for Robyn Williams' Science Show on Australian radio.