How do you crack nuts with a piece of string? Reverse gravity? Cobble
together a clock out of a coffee cup, a soda bottle, and some water? Use
a vacuum cleaner and nineteenth-century railroad technology to fashion a
makeshift bazooka that can launch paper projectiles? Create a rainbow in
a block of Jello? This is a one-volume romp through a whole array of
counterintuitive science experiments that require little more than
common household items and a sense of curiosity. Prepare to have your
surprise sensors on overload as Neil Downie stretches math, physics, and
chemistry to do what they have never done before.
This book describes twenty-nine unusual but practical experiments,
detailing how they are done and the math and physics behind them. It
will delight both casual and inveterate tinkerers. Of varying levels of
complexity, the experiments are grouped in sections covering a wide
field of physics and the borders of chemistry, ranging from dynamic
mechanics (''Kinetic Curiosities'') to electricity (''Antediluvian
Electronics'') and combustion (''Infernal Inventions''). The chapters
are titillatingly titled, from ''Twisted Sinews'' and ''Mole Radio'' to
''A Symphony of Siphons'' and ''Tornado Transistor.'' More-detailed
explanations, along with simple mathematical models using high-school
level math, are given in boxes accompanying each experiment.
Armchair scientists will welcome this edifying and entertaining
alternative to idleness, not least for the buoyant prose, enriched by
historical and literary anecdotes introducing each topic. With this book
in hand, tinkerers, whether dabblers in science or devotees, students or
teachers, need never again wonder how to impress friends, the judges at
the science fair, and, not least, themselves.
