It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to wish facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts…
– Sherlock Holmes, A scandal in Bohemia
The first beer was fermented, in terracotta jars, in the Neolithic period, to satisfy the interest of human beings for alcohol rather than for food (the first cultivation of vines was for wine, and not for food apparently).
Seven thousand years later we are still here, drinking and talking about it, and searching for the perfect brew, fresher, more bitter, more or less fizzy, the bubbles being a fundamental component of a beer worthy of the name.
Carbonated drinks, however, are also interesting from a physical point of view. The presence of bubbles, the size of the bubbles, the consistency of the foam, are all factors that depend on the degree of fermentation and the amount of alcohol present in the beverage. In Mescal for example (the archetypal Mexican liqueur made in the ninth circle of hell) the amount of alcohol determines the longevity of the bubbles on the surface. This has enormous implications for your next holiday in Mexico: if you pour a glass of Mescal you have to look at the bubbles and count slowly up to 30. If the bubbles remain, smile and drink because that means your Mescal is good. If they disappear after a few seconds though, you have been served a poor-quality Mescal. Dishonoured by this insult, you have no choice but the old-fashioned duel in the middle of the pueblo. To exact your revenge, you force the barman to drink the whole bottle of dodgy Mescal, to the music of Ennio Morricone (RIP) echoing around town as the church bell tolls outside.
If you want to know more about how alcohol affects the permanence of bubbles the work is by Rage et al. and has just been published in Nature (July 2020), and you can find it here.
In summer people shun scientific reading and prefer a shift towards lighter stuff, but this is wrong, because science books on the beach help to immediately establish a beach hierarchy, which is dangerously at risk when you spend 70% of your time in what is, at the end of the day, nothing but an underwear substitute.
Here are our top 3 books to take with you to the beach for summer 2020.
A classic: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Summer is the ideal time to try your hand at Taleb, who writes well and has a razor-sharp mind. Let yourself be fascinated while he explains, without too many preambles, why he is definitely smarter than you. From time to time he also explains why the future is unpredictable and risks are uncontrollable, and why, from Wall Street’s crises to the collapse of the Twin Towers, unpredictable events, the so-called black swans, are fundamental to human history.
A new(ish) one: Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith’s consciousness. For those who don’t yet know, octopuses are highly intelligent animals and this book illustrates all the subtle nuances of these sea geniuses. From tentacles covered with nerve endings to changing colours when they dream, we challenge you to ever eat one again after reading these pages (If you are not Italian, you probably never dared eat one anyhow, so don’t start now)
Comic: Meteor Men by Jeff Parker and Sandy Jarrell. Intriguing comic book that starts on a summer night. Alden Baylor, a normal kid, becomes the most important person in the world. The meteor shower that he thought was a nice event to break a banal summer night turns out to be an alien invasion, and the world is no longer the same. The protagonist is a young teenager, but this is not a soppy teenager book. One of those books you think about even after you’ve finished it.
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