Benoit Roman - Hidden wonders : the subtle dialogue between physics and elegance

HIDDEN WONDERS

Translation copyright 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Flammarion, Paris, 2018, Du merveilleux cach dans le quotidien

Diagrams: Laurent Blondel / Cordoc

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934592

ISBN: 978-0-262-36364-8

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When admiring the structure of the Eiffel Tower, the patterns that clay makes when it cracks, a birds nest, the wavy edge of a leaf of lettuce, or even the way pole vaulters poles bend, as if they were about to break just as they propel vaulters into the air, you may have intuited that behind the objects that populate our daily life theres strange beauty, a beauty that seems to be the fruit of a natural or willed order or underlying organization, but also of a function whose meaning we actually perceive without always being able to grasp it.

The purpose of this richly illustrated book is to reveal this beauty by relearning to see the world around us. It is the work of a team of researchers at the ESPCI (cole Suprieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris), and whose central themes lie where the physics of materials and mechanics intersect.

From the vaults of Azay-le-Rideau to soap foams, to a crumpled paper ball and a creeping vine bridge, the thirty-five themes addressed in this book might evoke an eclectic poetic inventory. This is not the case, of course: not satisfied to embody a fascinating dialogue among forms, forces, and functions, these subjects have in common the elegance of the shapes they exhibit, whether natural or human-made constructions.

You might rightly be surprised that the notion of elegance should be advanced in a book written by physicists. The term immediately evokes haute couture, which we will encounter in this book, but also harmony, delicacy, and simplicity. Thats why elegance makes sense in many other areas too: mathematicians, for example, are happy to talk about an elegant proof that makes it possible to reach a desired result: It was obvious; but we still had to come up with it! By revealing hidden elegance in various fields, we also want to shed a different light on our daily lives. Our ambition is to propose a certain way of looking, an art of observing at various scales, from the mite so dear to Pascal and La Fontaine to entire civil engineering constructions.

The starting point of this project was a large exhibition coordinated around the theme of Breaking/Flowing (Casser/Couler, later at Pariss science museum, Palais de la Dcouverte, under the title Ruptures). In keeping with our frequent participation in science fairs and other public events that present science as a hands-on pursuit, we have concluded each chapter with a short, illustrated, and easy-to-reproduce experiment.

Curiosity pushed us beyond this exhibition to explore other areas. Each chapter often resulted from sometimes unusual or random encounters with interlocutors from different spheres: master folders, glassblowers, wood carvers, cellists, artists and artisans, as well as research colleagues. The diversity of this book owes them a great deal.

The blog Hidden Wonders at https://blog.espci.fr/hiddenwonders/ supplements this book, with videos of experiments, relevant links, and bibliographic references, not to mention our new discoveries.

We invite you to explore with us some of the hidden wonders in our everyday life!

This incredible natural lace, about 10 centimeters long and 3 centimeters wide, is the Venus flower baskets skeleton, thus named because it constitutes a natural shelter for tiny crustaceans. The lattice structure is a twisted skein of fibers, themselves composed of silica grains welded together. Thanks to their hierarchical construction, these anonymous underwater beings seem to challenge masters of architecture such as Filippo Brunelleschi, Gustave Eiffel, and Frei Otto.