Physics-Everyday Phenomena: Art & Tech

by Jearl Walker

Book Overview

"These articles appeared in Scientific American from 1954 to 1979: Growth of Snow Crystals; Aurora; Shape of Raindrops; River Meanders; Thunder; Why the Sea is Salt; Ocean Waves; Fog." This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0716711265
• ISBN13: 9780716711261
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: W.H. Freeman & Company
• Length: 86 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An excellent collection of articles

This book includes eight wonderful reprints from the Scientific American. I find the topics fascinating. I read all these articles when they first appeared, and they are surprisingly relevant even 25 to 50 years later. The first article, by Basil Mason, is from 1961, on snowflakes. He shows what kinds of snow crystals exist and describes his experiments to grow artificial snowflakes on filaments. Of course, plenty of work has been done on this topic since then. The next article is from 1965, by Syun-Ichi Akasofu, on the Aurora. This is the article that first got me interested in the Aurora, and I learned much more about it since then. Akasofu, in a superb article, tells us about auroral substorms and the related polar electrojets and much more. This is a very challenging field to do research in! James McDonald has an article, from 1954, on the shape of raindrops. What do you suppose they look like? Are they tapered? Spherical? Um, no. They look more like small hamburger buns, nearly hemispherical. After that comes an article from 1966 by Luna Leopold and W. B. Langden, on river meanders. That's a fun topic to think about; even Einstein wrote about river meanders once. The authors show that the pattern of river meanders is consistent with the fact that in the absence of any other constraints, a "sine-generated curve is the most probable path of fixed length between two fixed points." As someone with a college degree in acoustics, I especially liked the next article, from 1975, by Arthur Few. It is about thunder! Thunder is the result of shock waves generated by lightning, of course. Less than a percent of the shock wave goes into an acoustic wave, but that's still enough to make thunder really loud. Ferren MacIntyre has an article from 1970, explaining why the sea is so salty. He gives us a fine description of the geochemical cycle that is involved here. There is an article from 1959, by Willard Bascom, on ocean waves. Of course, this is also an interesting topic for someone learning about acoustics, since fluid mechanics is a fundamental part of the subject. The author includes a discussion of tsunamis. Bascom said in the article that "within the next century we can expect that somewhere a wave will at least equal the one that swept the shores of the Bay of Bengal in 1876, leaving 200,000 dead." The final article, by Joel Myers, is from 1968 and is about fog. Fog is of course, simply a cloud on the ground. Myers explains how fog can persist as long as it does. He points out that smog is often misnamed, as it is generally simply a haze of pollutants that are trapped by an inversion layer of dry air rather than fog. I recommend this fine collection of articles about natural and familiar phenomena.