Most of the time.” Zucker made his way to the UK and befriended a handful of folks in the world of stamp collecting who provided him with the mail in need of delivery. She tells the story of a German inventor in the 1930s, a time when technology was at the point where “you could launch a rocket that would probably go in the right direction and probably wouldn’t kill anyone. Or, the more of one thing, the more of the other.įrom air pockets that grow in the kneading and rising of dough for focaccia bread to the katabatic winds of Antarctica to the way an elephant draws water up into its trunk to empty out into its mouth, Czerski delights in tales of the working out of the Ideal Gas Law in ways both exotic and ordinary, right up until she reaches Gerhard Zucker’s ill-fated rocket post. Thus, like Czerski’s example of “double the pressure, halve the volume,” a person could say the more of one thing, the less of the other. To be proportional, or directly proportional, on the other hand, is to move in the same direction.

If I’ve got it right (admittedly, there’s no particular reason to believe it so), to be inversely proportional the measurements we’re tracking move away from each other at equal intervals. What’s going on, Helen Czerski and the Ideal Gas Law will tell us, is that “for a fixed mass of gas the pressure is inversely proportional to volume (if you double the pressure, you halve the volume), the temperature is proportional to the pressure (if you double the temperature, you double the pressure), and that the volume is proportional to the temperature, at fixed pressure.” It’s that law that explains how, when kernels heat up in a skillet of oil, gas molecules knock around inside the shell until the “moment of catastrophe” when the shell, originally intended to “withstand assault from the outside, but now it had to contain an internal rebellion,” blows apart into an explosion of fluffy, delicious popcorn. It merely tells us how these organized gangs of atoms already mean to conduct themselves when we turn up the heat or apply a little more pressure. It’s hardly out there bossing gas molecules around. They simply wish to express a thing that already is, to codify the way in which things do, in fact, behave, rather than to tell a person how they ought to behave, and the penalties to be imposed when they opt not to. Scientific laws, it turns out, are my favorite sort of laws.

Yet, here we are, on a poetry site, about to embark on a meander through the Ideal Gas Law. No matter the time of day, it may seem too early to talk about inverse proportions.

Editor’s Note: This post is the first in a three-part book club discussion of Helen Czerski’s Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life.

Storm in a teacup summary