H2O: A Biography of Water

"A few years ago I attended a workshop at the Vatican Observatory on water in the solar system, and started to wonder exactly how old the water in my tea cup was. Was it here from earth’s formation, or did it crash land on a craggy ball of dust sometime later? I wrote “A brief history of water in the universe” for Nature Chemistry, and in doing the research for that, encountered Philip Ball’s biography of water. Some years ago I had assigned Ball’s Designing the Molecular World to my introductory chemistry course along with the more usual thousand-page textbook, in part because I wanted them to appreciate the beauty and excitement of chemical research. H2O didn’t disappoint me. Ball talks about tough scientific topics in ways that are both accurate and truly accessible. Water is such an iconic molecule, and such a ubiquitous one. It’s in the clouds and the oceans; it runs in our veins, and is tucked into the inner spaces of our cellular machinery. Ball tells its story with sharp science and thought provoking imagery. One image that has really stuck with me is that we shouldn’t think of clouds as discrete entities, like cotton puffs floating above the earth, but rather see them as processes, like waterfalls, ever changing. The chapter on weird water wanders through not just the odder stories (and fictions) about water, but has something deeper to say about the line between science and pseudoscience that we would all do well to heed in this era of “fake news”."