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Jeff Stewart - E=MC2: Simple Physics: Why Balloons Rise, Apples Fall & Golf Balls Go Awry

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E=MC2: Simple Physics: Why Balloons Rise, Apples Fall & Golf Balls Go Awry
Author:
Jeff Stewart
Publisher:
Readers Digest
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Books / Children
Year:
2010
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You dont have to be Einstein to understand quantum physics. With amusing examples from film, TV, and history, learn how physics affects everything in your surroundingswithout the use of mind-bending math or the need for a particle accelerator. With E=MC2, youll learn: When forces balance: Simple answers to questions such as, Why do balloons rise while apples fall? The Good, the Bad, and the Impossible: Why The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is full of absurdities. (For someone whose characters often uphold the law, Clint Eastwood certainly defies the laws of physics in this film.) AC/DC: but only AC really rocks: Alternating current (AC) is much more complicated than direct current (DC). The voltage is constantly moving between positive and negative; the current therefore flows one way, and then the other (rocking back and forth). Why do I feel this warm glow?: The theory behind how the first stars were born General Relativity and GPS: The strange result of gravity on time is well proven. Compared to the interminable time you experience while stuck in a traffic jam, time literally runs faster (because gravity is weaker) in the orbiting GPS satellites that help your GPS system get its fix. At the speed of light: A refresher on the theory of relativity and an understanding of whya hundred years laterEinsteins physics still points the way in cutting-edge research. Yu again: In the martial arts movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the rebellious young heroine, Jen Yu, blocks an attacker with her hand without standing or bracing herself. All the while, she holds a cup of tea in her other hand and doesnt spill a drop. Find out why kinetic energy and scalar quantity make her move impossible.
Its physics for the rest of us. So why not come along for the ride? Advance at the speed of light through the fundamental laws of physics as they were discovered, proven wrong, and revolutionized.
Make this and all of the Blackboard Books(tm) a permanent fixture on your shelf, and youll have instant access to a breadth of knowledge. Whether you need homework help or want to win that trivia game, this series is the trusted source for fun facts.

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Table of Contents

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain

A Brief History of Physics

What exactly is physics?

Well, in a way, its everything.

Physics aims to tell us about a big bang that created the universe long ago, to explain how people got here from there (and why we wont be going anywhere else in a hurry), and to show how and why everything around us works as it does.

It tells us how the first bits of matter appeared, how the first stars were born, and how, over billions of years, the universe came to be the vast and violent place we know, with our planet an insignificant speck on the edge of one galaxy in 125 billion.

It explains almost everything that happens in the world around us: energy and movement, sound and light, electricity and matter. And its laws form the basis of chemistry and biology.

Physics also suggests exciting new ideas. For example, it says that time travel may be possible. Unfortunately, it also says that were probably too big to try it.

In short, modern physics gives us a fascinating, awe-inspiring, and sometimes downright weird view of the universe and our place in it.

Falling apples, rising balloons, and errant golf balls are just the start.

Its the law

Physicistsa mixture of mathematical thinkers and more practical types who enjoy doing experiments, such as smashing tiny bits of stuff into even tinier bitsthink that they can explain all this because everything happens according to the laws of nature.

These laws show that, if this thing happens, then so will that. If I hang a weight (me, for example) from a spring, the amount it stretches will be proportional to my weight: double the weight, double the stretch. (This particular law is known as Hookes Law because it was discovered by the 17th-century British physicist Robert Hooke.)

The laws of physics are useful to us because physics is a practical science. What weve learned has helped us build everything from bathroom scales (that spring again) to a billion shiny gadgets, from the bulbs that light up our cities to the airplanes we take to fly between those cities.

Of course, it has also brought us enough nuclear war-heads to blow all of thisand us, and life as we know itto pieces.

How we found physics

People have always tried to explain and predict the world around them. It seems to be an essential part of what makes us human. But it wasnt until we got past blaming everything from lightning to earthquakes on a bunch of irritable gods that we started getting anything useful out of our explanations.

So thats what physics is. But a quick run through 2,500 years of scientific progress will give us a better idea of how it got us here. And, hopefully, prove to anyone still frightened by the subject that it doesnt biteeven if it does bang.

Its all Greek

Almost 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greeks did a lot of thinking about science. Besides running around naked at the first Olympic games, writing tall tales about gods, cunning heroes and many-headed monsters, and building wonderful temples, they came up with plenty of interesting theories.

For example, Thales supposed that all the earth floated on water, so that earthquakes were caused by waves. Aristotle, whose Physica is the first work on physics to use the word in the title, believed that everything in the world was made up of earth, air, fire, and water, with the heavens made of a divine substance called ether. Smoke, he thought, rose, because it was mainly made up of air, and air always tended to be above earth.

These were nice simple theories, but the Greeks generally argued that an object does something because its the kind of object that does that kind of thing. This gets us nowhere: its a circular argument; a good example of what modern physics isnt. (Today, we try to explain things in terms of other things, which is a nice way of saying we usually like to blame someone else.)

Strictly speaking, the Greeks said that, for example, all circles we see are somehow shadows of the Form of roundness. Forms were supposed to be divine, perfect and not of this world, so that the Form of roundness set the perfect example for all other round things. But, it seems, theres no getting around the fact that an objects roundness is still explained by the fact that it is, well, round. Which is, as we noted, circular.

Mind games

Part of the problem was that the ancient Greeks tended to think that you should be able to figure out what happens in the world through the power of thought alone. The world around us was imperfect, so, they thought, there wasnt much point looking at it too closely and expecting it to behave in a regular way.

And even when they did observe what was going on around them, they made some strange mistakes. For example, Aristotle made detailed studies of plants and animals, but thought that as a rule, men have more teeth than women.

Predicting the planets

A few hundred years later, another ancient Greek called Ptolemy (ignore that first p when you say his name, or you may be accused of spitting) came up with a fairly accurate mathematical system for predicting the position of the stars and planets.

This was a big step forward for science, except he also thought that the planets (and the sun) revolved around the Earth. This meant that to make his numbers work, he had to predict that the moon would sometimes come twice as close to the Earth as at other times. As a result, he thought that we should regularly see the moon appear to double in size.

Of course the moon never grew, but in the Western world, Greek ideas held sway in physics for 1,500 years. Partly this was because the church supported them: Greek thinking, like Christianity, put man at the center of the universe, and with the stars all fixed to the inside of a huge sphere that contained the universe, it also left plenty of room outside for heaven and hell.

As Greek civilization declined, many of its ideas and writings were saved by Islamic scholars, who refined them and slowly increased the importance of math and observation, particularly in the study of light, the stars and motion. This was a good move because, as it turned out, math and observation turned out to be the key to progress in science.

The scientific revolution

It may seem obvious now, but this new way of thinking revolutionized the way we understand the world. People started to discover that by looking carefully, measuring time and distance and energy, and by putting the numbers together with math and careful thought, we could predictat least in the laboratory, under carefully controlled conditionswhat would happen next and why it would happen. (Actually, its amazing how far you can get without mathematics, as this book proves. You need math to write your theories neatly and to prove them to other scientists, but usually you can understand the big ideas pretty well without it.)

Astronomy also progressed, with the theory that the Earth revolved around the sun slowly gaining favor, despite the efforts of the Catholic Church. The Bible says that the world is firmly fixed, and this revolutionary new theory was, indeed, revolutionary.

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