Hervé This started his career in molecular gastronomy when he tried to shortcut a recipe - adding all the egg yolks to a dish at once, instead of the prescribed 2-at-a-time.

When the shortcut didn’t work, he started investigating how these apparently-arbitrary rules work.

That was 27 years and 25,000 rules ago.

Apparently his discoveries work well enough that someone’s given him access to a million-dollar nuclear-magnetic-resonance device. He uses it to figure out why peas change colour when they are cooked.

Courtesy of Why-Read’s article.