You Are Reading This Because of a Physics Question

What happens when a battery scientist gets a small room and time to think

More Butter is out today. You are reading this because several years ago, in a small room a long way from home, I got interested in why some things persist and others fall apart. That question had nothing to do with food. It is the reason all four of my books exist, and the reason this page does. Where it goes next is not settled. I have something to ask you about that, and it is at the bottom of this page.

Five years ago I was a physical scientist and engineer working in batteries, with a career spent leading teams that brought new chemistries into the market. I was sick and I was functioning. Those two things coexisted for a long time, which is the part that is easy to miss from the outside. Nothing about my life looked like a crisis. I got up, I worked, I traveled, I delivered. I was also, by every measure I later bothered to look at, in trouble.

Then a dinner, when I was sixty-six. I have written about that evening twice now and I will not repeat it here. What followed took about two years, removed seventy pounds, and gave back most of what I had been told was age.

Then a fortuitous change in my work took me, for a significant part of my life, to a small room far from home. A room, and time.

That is the part nobody expects, and it took me a while to see it for what it was. The room gave me hours. The change that came before it had already given me something I needed more than hours, which was a working head. The fog had lifted. I cannot tell you when it went, only that I could hold a problem in mind for a full evening again and I had not been able to do that in years. Everything I have written since is downstream of that. It is also the plainest evidence I have that the change did something real. Not a lab value. Four books that the man who sat down to that dinner could not have written.

So for the first time in a working life I had hours to think about something that was not on a schedule, and a head clear enough to use them. What I thought about first had nothing to do with food. It was a physics question. Why do some things persist and others do not, and what does feedback have to do with it? I worked on it the way I would have worked on any problem at the bench, and eventually I wrote an academic paper.

Then I looked at the paper and asked two questions about it. Who is going to read this? And of what use is it? Almost nobody, and not much. An idea that no one outside the field can reach is not doing any work.

So I wrote it again. Patterns of Persistence was an exercise: take the ideas in the paper and put them into lay language a generally educated person could follow and perhaps apply to their own life, without the jargon and without the defensive hedging that academic writing requires. It was my first attempt at that translation and it taught me most of what I know about doing it.

The ideas would not stay put. Persistence and feedback turned out to have a great deal to say about the origin of life and about what selection is actually selecting for, and that became a second book, The First Natural Selection. I was still inside my own metabolic change while I wrote it. Somewhere in there I began to suspect I had a story worth telling, though I had no idea what shape it should take.

The shape arrived when I finished the evolution work. I could suddenly see the whole line: chemistry to origins to us, and then forward through the last century to what is in the grocery store. It was one continuous path, and it was the path my own body had been walking without my consent. I understood then that my story could not start with me. It had to start there.

So I did the investigation first. What happened to the food supply, who decided it, what they were paid, and what the evidence actually shows about sugar. Then I fit my own history on top of that structure, because a case needs something to hang on and because I happened to have a body that had run the experiment. That is Butter in My Coffee. The argument carries the weight. The story carries the reader.

And then, finishing it, I ran into the thing I had not looked at.

The reason I spent decades getting sicker was not that I was careless. It was the opposite. I did what I was told, thoroughly, without interruption, for most of my adult life. I was rigorous about the wrong instructions and I never once asked who wrote them. The discipline that made me good at my work was the same discipline that kept me aimed at the wrong target, and it did that precisely because I did not question the source.

That is a different book, and it is the one that is out today. More Butter is the memoir. It is about the rule that built me and then trapped me, and about what it cost to find that out.

Something else happened along the way that I did not anticipate. Patterns of Persistence and The First Natural Selection have drawn modest attention, which is about what I expected; they ask a reader to care about persistence and origins, and most people have other things to do. Butter in My Coffee did something else entirely, and I am frankly amazed by it. Readers write to me. They tell other people. They describe their own histories in terms I recognize immediately, because the terms were mine.

Nearly every one of you reading this today read that book first. I am truly humbled by that interest, and I thank you for it. All of you.

I have thought about why the book landed, and I do not think the answer is the book. I think it is that the outcome in it is one a great many people want badly and have been told is not available to them. They are living inside the same conditions I was living inside, and in a good many cases worse ones. They are carrying the same explanation I carried, which is that this is what getting older looks like. When somebody learns that the explanation might be wrong, they become very interested.

That has changed what I intend to do with the time I have. I did not set out to advocate for anything. I was a scientist with a question, and then a man with a story. But what actually moved me was not a treatment, a product, or a program. It was finding out how something worked and then acting on what I found. Education and investigation are the mechanism, and personal change is what they are for. I have become serious about arguing for that, and I will admit to some passion about it.

I want to be careful about how that sounds. I have no medical training. My doctorate is in physical chemistry, not medicine, and I am not anyone’s physician. What I was trained to do, and what I have spent a working life doing, is investigate something thoroughly and draw conclusions that hold up under examination. That is the qualification I bring and it is the only one I claim. The whole of my personal evidence amounts to one body, which is the weakest kind of evidence there is. What I have beyond that is feedback. People write to tell me that something here changed how they eat, or what they asked their doctor, or what they had stopped expecting of themselves. I cannot verify most of it, and I do not know how long any of it holds. But it is a signal, and it says that this work might be doing some good.

I think that is general. I do not believe anyone sustains effort at anything without some return signal that the effort is working. We move toward evidence that we have had a positive effect, and we go slack without it, and whatever else motivation is made of, that is the engine underneath it. I am no exception and I claim no discipline here. I keep doing this because the signal keeps coming back.

That signal is also the mechanism. It returns, it reinforces the thing that produced it, and it makes the next round larger. A book found readers. The readers returned evidence that the book was useful. That evidence is why there is a second book and why there is this page. It is also precisely what the paper in that small room was about. I do not have a better name for the capacity to amplify a positive effect than purpose.

Which is why this publication exists. A book is finished; the questions are not. New evidence arrives. I get things wrong and have to say so. The news produces something that needs an answer, and readers ask what I did not think to answer. Twice a week, this is where that goes. It is the part of the work that does not close.

What it becomes I do not know yet, and I would rather not decide that by myself. Tell me what you want more of and what you can do without. Ask what you did not get answered. Tell me where I am wrong, which is the most useful thing anyone sends me. And if something here is worth someone else’s time, send it to them. That is the amplification I just described, and it is the only way any of this reaches past the people already reading. We can work out the shape of it together.

I did not set out to do any of it. I set out to answer a physics question in a small room far from home, having recently gotten my life back and having no idea yet what to do with the time.

More Butter is available today in ebook, paperback, and hardcover.