Hidden Wonders
  • Published: 13 April 2021
  • ISBN: 9780262539890
  • Imprint: MIT Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 324
  • RRP: $65.00
Categories:

Hidden Wonders

The Subtle Dialogue Between Physics and Elegance

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The hidden elegance in everyday objects and physical mechanisms, from crumpled paper to sandcastles.

The hidden elegance in everyday objects and physical mechanisms, from crumpled paper to sandcastles.

Hidden Wonders focuses on the objects that populate our everyday life--crumpled paper, woven fabric, a sand pile--but looks at them with a physicist's eye, revealing a hidden elegance in mundane physical mechanisms. In six chapters--Builders, Creating Shapes, Building with Threads, From Sand to Glass, Matter in Motion, and Fractures--the authors present brief stories, set in locales ranging from the Eiffel Tower to a sandcastle, that illustrate the little wonders hidden in the ordinary. A simple experiment that readers can perform at home concludes each story. More than 200 illustrations bring the stories to life.
  • Published: 13 April 2021
  • ISBN: 9780262539890
  • Imprint: MIT Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 324
  • RRP: $65.00
Categories:

Praise for Hidden Wonders

"In this book, beauty comes from nature itself and all its secrets, revealed by physics, without breaking its charms." --Le Monde

"How everyday objects reflect deep and beautiful mathematics and physics. You'll never look at a bubble, a spider's web, or a wineglass in quite the same way again. Utterly fascinating!" -- Ian Stewart, Author of Do Dice Play God?, Calculating the Cosmos, and The Beauty of Numbers in Nature (MIT Press, 2017)

"Hidden Wonders is a lovely reminder that amazing science needn't be exotic or remote, but surrounds us every day with riches at the same time reassuringly familiar and constantly surprising." --Philip Ball