The answer to the most tormenting question - not why we can’t seem to forgo dessert, but why all this happens - eludes us.” The result is a wash: Your body is yanked more forcefully, but accelerates more reluctantly, and you end up falling at the same rate as the fork. But since you weigh so much more (especially after dessert), your mass takes longer to speed up, just as a truck accelerates more sluggishly than a sports car. There’s enough interesting material here to furnish a small encyclopedia.īut sometimes, the jocularity that might have worked in the classroom begins to seem a bit forced in chapter after chapter: “If you jump off a table just as a fork falls off, Earth’s gravity pulls on your body with greater force than it pulls on the fork. The same principle makes tornadoes lift roofs and lets airplanes fly.”īerman touches on a dizzying array of subjects, including UV rays, inert gases, fossils, meteorites, microwaves, rainbows, black holes, space exploration, phases of the moon, solstices, why shadows are blue and hypothetical travel at the speed of light. The stream pulls adjacent air along with it, creating a partial vacuum that sucks in the curtain. A plastic curtain pulling inward toward your leg when you turn on the shower illustrates Bernoulli’s principle: “A rapid flow of liquid or gas reduces air pressure in its vicinity. The wail of an emergency vehicle siren demonstrates the Doppler shift, also called the Doppler effect. In “Strange Universe,” Bob Berman, who writes a column bearing that title for Astronomy magazine, invites us to take a closer look at ordinary aspects of our daily lives to discover the true strangeness of the world in which we live.Īs he shows, even the smallest details can tell a story. Yet this in itself presents a problem: Because many of these phenomena defy our common-sense notions of cause and effect, they are hard to explain in a way that is understandable to the layman. The simple (or not so simple) facts of how things work involve truths that are stranger than the most fantastic fiction.
And, heaven knows, the material is innately interesting.
Science writers are one group working hard to close that gap, from Matt Ridley explaining the workings of genes to Carl Sagan explaining the workings of the universe. Trained in both areas, he was alarmed by the extent to which people proficient in the one often lacked any real knowledge of the other.
Snow expressed his concern over the separateness of the “two cultures”: the humanities on the one hand and the sciences on the other. Half a century ago, British novelist, scientist and civil servant C.P.
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