The Flying Circus of Physics

By Jearl Walker

Book Overview

Hurry Hurry Come one, come all. Meet a man who can pull two railroad passenger cars with his teeth and a real-life human cannon ball. Come face to face with a dead rattlesnake that still bites. And unlock the secrets of a magician's bodiless head. Welcome to this updated edition of The Flying Circus of Physics, where death-defying stunts, high-flying acrobatics, strange curiosities, and mind-bending illusions bring to life the fascinating feats of physics in the world around us.

In 1977, Wiley published the first edition of Jearl Walker's The Flying Circus of Physics, which has sold over 100,000 copies and become a cult classic in the physics community. The Flying Circus is a compendium of interesting real world phenomena that can be explained using basic laws of physics. This new edition represents a thorough updating and modernization of the book. The new edition gives us the opportunity to highlight Jearl's creativity, his communication skills, and his ability to make physics interesting.

Jearl Walker, Ph.D., professor of physics at Cleveland State University and the man who frequently walked on hot coals and lay on beds of nails all in the name of science, is the first recipient of the Outstanding Teaching Award from Cleveland State's College of Science. The College's Faculty Affairs Committee selected Dr. Walker as the first honoree based on his impressive contributions to science teaching over the last 30 years. In fact, the award in future years will be named the Jearl Walker Outstanding Teaching Award in recognition of his many achievements.

Jearl Walker received his B.S. in physics from MIT in 1967 and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland in 1973. His popular book, The Flying Circus of Physics, has been translated into at least 10 languages and is still being sold worldwide. For 16 years he toured his fun-filled Flying Circus lecture throughout the U.S. and Canada, introducing countless teachers to such physics phenomena as molecular adhesion by hanging spoons from his face and Leidenfrost's phenomenon by dipping his wet hand in molten lead without getting hurt.

These lectures led to his national PBS television show, Kinetic Karnival, which ran for several years and won him a local Emmy Award. During his 13 years as a columnist with Scientific American magazine, Dr. Walker wrote 152 articles for The Amateur Scientist section, which were translated into at least 9 languages worldwide. His topics ranged from the physics of judo to the physics of bearnaise sauce and lemon meringue pie. In 1990, he took over the textbook Fundamentals of Physics from David Halliday and Robert Resnick and has now published the seventh edition of the book. He has appeared countless times on television and radio and in newspapers and magazines.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471762733
• ISBN13: 9780471762737
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.5" x 10.9"

Customer Reviews

This book relates physics to life!

I am a retired science person who volunteers as an eighth grade science teacher. My primary notion is to convince the students that an understanding of the basic ideas of physics will enable you to comprehend more complex principals. To accomplish this, I am always searching for real life examples which demonstrate physics ideas. "The Flying Circus of Physics" provides a rich mix of these examples that makes the student see physics as part of their day-to-day life and not an abstraction.

wonder-full

This is my favorite book. This is a fantastic collection of hundreds of physics puzzlers, many taken from everyday life. It is full of thought-provoking questions about: superballs, silly putty, tops, and yo-yos; boiling water, dripping faucets, and blowing bubbles; rain, rainbows, snow, lightning, and tornados; bicycles, cars, boats, airplanes, and spaceships; magnets, electricity, radio, and television. It has answers in the back, but it is more fun if you try to figure it out for yourself, and resist looking up the answer. Some of these simple questions are so deep that scientists don't know the answers yet. Literally wonder-full.

Kicked Off A Lifelong Interest in Science

A favorite uncle gave me this book when I was eleven or twelve, and I went on to love it literally to pieces. **But I still have all the pieces**, and I give copies of this book to kids who seem succeptible to it like I was. Potential buyers should know that the book is arranged in an unusual format. One section, the questions, is divided topically into the major subcategories of physics; questions are numbered by category and then sequentially, such as 5.8, 5.9, 5.10... The answers to the questions are found in a separate section, using the numbers. Because of this, you tend to read the book with a finger stuck in the answers so you can find your place when you go to check your work. There is also a separate bibliography section, but I never paid much attention to that as a kid :^)

Thought Provoking & Ultimate Lab Supplement

This is a book of real-world physics questions and explainations. Billiards, air-conditioning, carnival games, and more are covered.Our high school advanced physics course used this book for a "special" kind of weekly lab where groups of students were assigned a few questions and the group was to write up short answers/explainations to the questions posed by Jearl, applying the concepts we learned in class and stretching our thought process.Most questions have solid physics explainations, some don't. As such, scores were given based on insight, communication, and application.The point of this book is to provoke thought and grab students' interest, and Jearl is a master.

Entertaining and enlightening

You can learn a lot of physics from this book. It can help you develop the kind of intuition that you will not get from conventional physics books. In addition, you can learn some off-beat physics that is not normally taught in classes.