 Storm in a Tea-Cup by Helen Chersky, read by Chloe Massey. While I was a university student, I spent a while doing physics revision at my Nana's house. Nana, a down-to-earth northerner, was very impressed when I told her that I was studying the structure of the atom. Ooh! she said. And what can you do when you know that? It is a very good question. Introduction. We live on the edge, perched on the boundary between planet Earth and the rest of the universe. On a clear night, anyone can admire the vast legions of bright stars, familiar and permanent, landmarks unique to our place in the cosmos. Every human civilization has seen the stars, but no one has touched them. Our home here on Earth is the opposite. Messy, changeable, bursting with novelty and full of things that we touch and tweak every day. This is the place to look if you're interested in what makes the universe tick. The physical world is full of startling variety, caused by the same principles and the same atoms, combining in different ways to produce a rich bounty of outcomes. But this diversity isn't random. Our world is full of patterns. If you pour milk into your tea and give it a quick stir, you'll see a swirl, a spiral of two fluids circling each other while barely touching. In your teacup, the spiral lasts just a few seconds before the two liquids mix completely. But it was there for long enough to be seen, a brief reminder that liquids mix in beautiful swirling patterns and not by merging instantaneously. The same pattern can be seen in other places, too, for the same reason. If you look down on the Earth from space, you will often see very similar swirls in the clouds, made where warm air and cold air waltz around each other instead of mixing directly. In Britain, these swirls come rolling across the Atlantic from the West on a regular basis, causing ornatoriously changeable weather. They form at the boundary between cold polar air to the north and warm tropical air to the south. The cool and warm air chase each other around in circles, and you can see the pattern clearly on satellite images. We know these swirls as depressions or cyclones, and we experience rapid changes between wind, rain and sunshine as the arms of the spiral spin past. A rotating storm might seem to have very little in common with a stirred mug of tea, but the similarity in the patterns is more than coincidence. It's a clue that hints at something more fundamental. Hidden beneath both is a systematic basis for all such for...