Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again

Jackson (Physics: An Illustrated History of the Foundations of Science) packs an amazing amount of information into this fascinating history of humanity’s ongoing quest for refrigeration. While readers might guess that humans’ first efforts to preserve food through cold occurred with the 19th-century icebox or the 20th-century refrigerator, that’s woefully incorrect. Jackson describes elaborate efforts to preserve ice and use it as a food preservative in ancient Mesopotamia and Persia, as early as 1775 BCE. He works his way forward through the centuries, chronicling first a growing understanding of just what “cold” actually is, and then the ways and means that individuals began to profit from it. Jackson makes it clear that “it’s the fridge that makes the modern city” and that refrigeration makes possible everything from nitrogen fertilizers to the bizarre Bose-Einstein condensate, a fifth state of matter only possible at billionths of a degree above absolute zero. He also looks to the future for further advances that frigidity may make possible, noting that development of a quantum computer will almost certainly depend on scientists’ ability to wield cold and seeing the Bose-Einstein condensate as a potential component of teleportation engineering. Jackson magnificently shows that science is “cool.” [em](Sept.) [/em]