How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the Ordinary [Paperback]

Louis A. Bloomfield (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0470170662 | ISBN-13: 978-0470170663 | Publication Date: August 24, 2007 | Edition: 1

Why do golf balls have dimples?
How does an iPod turn binary digits into Bon Jovi?
How do microwave ovens cook?
How does a pitcher make a curveball curve and a knuckleball jitter?
Why don't you fall off an upside-down roller coaster?

If one didn't know better, one might think the world was filled with magic—from the household appliances that make our lives easier to the devices that fill our world with sounds and images. Even a simple light bulb can seem mysterious when you're clueless about the science behind it.

Now in How Everything Works, Louis Bloomfield takes you inside the amazing gizmos and gadgets that are part of the fabric of our everyday life, explaining the physics that makes them work. Examining everything from roller coasters to radio, knuckleballs to nuclear weapons, How Everything Works reveals the answers to such questions as why the sky is blue, why metal is a problem in microwave ovens, how MRIs see inside you, and why some clothes require dry cleaning.

You don't need a science or engineering background to understand How Everything Works. All you need is an active curiosity about the extraordinary world all around you. Remarkably clear and always fascinating, How Everything Works is nothing short of a user's manual for our everyday world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Books on how things work often adopt a format that gives equal space to each device described. So the flush toilet, say, might get the same number of words devoted to it as the internal-combustion engine, even though the latter is far more complicated. In How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the Ordinary, Louis Bloomfield avoids that trap by taking just as long as he needs to explain things. And that's exactly what he does, explain things, his chapters having such titles as "Things That Involve Light," "Things That Move With Fluids, "Things That Involve Chemical Physics" and so forth. The result is something of a cross between those familiar (and often less-than-satisfying) how-it-works guides and a full-blown physics textbook.

Although Bloomfield demonstrates considerable knowledge about the history of science and technology, his aim is clearly to explain how things work rather than how they were developed. Thus his treatment of the transistor very appropriately jumps straight to the field-effect transistor, which is fairly easy to understand, without first explaining its more complex predecessor, the bipolar transistor.

Bloomfield also shows excellent judgment about how far to dive in. (One exception here is his cursory treatment of magnetic resonance imaging, a technology that is admittedly very difficult to explain in anything other than a superficial manner.) His section on the microwave oven, for example, helped me finally to understand how a cavity magnetron works. Bloomfield also straightened me out on the difference between a turbojet engine (above, right) and a turbofan engine (left), a distinction I hadn't at all appreciated. And he even clued me in on why thefront fork of a child's bike isn't curved forward. All but the most hard-core technophile should find many similar moments of enlightenment in this delightfully informative book.-- David Schneider

From the Inside Flap

 

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Product Details

• Paperback: 736 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (August 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470170662
• ISBN-13: 978-0470170663
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #158,222 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Louis A. Bloomfield is Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia and author of How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the Ordinary (Wiley, 2007).

Bloomfield received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1983 and was a postdoctoral fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories before arriving at the University of Virginia in 1985. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research in atomic, condensed matter, and optical physics, including the Apker Award of the American Physical Society, a Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, a Young Investigator Award of the Office of Naval Research, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and he is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Bloomfield has also been widely recognized for his teaching of physics and science to thousands of non-science students at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a 1998 State of Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award and the 2001 Pegram Medal of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society. He is the author of almost 100 publications in the fields of atomic clusters, autoionizing states, high-resolution laser spectroscopy, nonlinear optics, computer science, and general science literacy, and of a recent introductory textbook entitled How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life, 3rd Edition (Wiley, New York, 2006).

Bloomfield also works extensively with professional societies and the media to explain physics to the general public. He frequently serves as a physics consultant and as an expert witness on legal matters that require a broad understanding of physics and scientific issues.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best though-provoker since Brief History of Time, May 25, 2006

By 

Steve P. Chasey (Vancouver, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the Ordinary (Hardcover)

I've read a number of science books over the years, some under duress, and others for the pleasurable bending of the brain that it provokes. This book ranks right alongside Hawkings' Brief History of time in terms of perspective-altering clout. Bloomfield's style is clear and concise, never lost me in the mumbo-jumbo, and is radiating with his own voice, a voice that is clearly ecstatic over the physics of microwaving metals, the curveball, and every other type of everyday physics you can imagine. He even made P-N junctions hilarious, if you dont know what that is, just look for the section about theatre patrons being hurled around by gorillas...

For days after reading this book I found myself wondering about the physics of things going on around me, and often able to come up with some realistic, (at least to my mind!) explanations for them based on the principles in How Eevrything Works.

If I'm sounding a bit like a big cheerleader for this book, that's good, I would encourage anyone to pick it up and read it through, if for no other reason than a few trippy days afterwards, staring at elevators and water pipes in awe.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow!! This book is EXCELLENT. Thousands of years of knowledge in under 700 pages., June 19, 2008

By 

Romulus (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the Ordinary (Paperback)

Amazing.

I have bought hundreds of things from Amazon, books and otherwise, and have never felt the need to leave a review. This book is so phenomenal in its clarity, depth, and topic range that I simply feel obligated to rave.

Although I'm a grad student in CS my knowledge of physics is very weak, and there was a time when I dreaded physics in college. So when I ordered this book I was expecting something along the lines of an idiots guide. When it arrived, the textbook-like layout almost scared me off from reading, but when I started I couldn't put it down.

Almost every big question I've asked myself about the physics of the world I live in is answered clearly in this book, given our current state of knowledge. The planets and their relationship to calendars and cycles, eclipses and tides. Electricity. Light. Electromagnetics. Semiconductors. Airplanes. Buoyancy. Nuclear reactors. Power production, and on and on and on. So much, and described so well, that I've decided to put several weeks aside to enjoy this book.

For instance, in answering a question about electricity the author will take you on a seamless journey from Edison's initial ideas to modern distribution systems, to resistance, to types of current, to transformers, to voltage, to generators and motors, down to individual components like capacitors and semiconductors.

And the detail and flow is just beautiful. Prof Bloomfield achieved a very rare, delicate balance between being overly simplistic, and drowning the reader with unnecessary details. This sets the book miles apart from anything I've ever read about physics.

It's actually quite remarkable to know that so many who came before us have spent countless lifetimes trying to obtain the knowledge that is now on the pages of a book like this. Most people take these things for granted. And then there's a tiny minority amongst us who choose to know and understand.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb, February 23, 2009

By 

An Amazonian (Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the Ordinary (Paperback)

Many of the popular physics books that have sold well since I started reading them about 20 years ago deal either with the incredibly small (quantum physics) or with the incredibly large/fast (relativity). These fields are where the action has been recently, so that's understandable. But the physics that operates in machines and things we see around us every day is largely classical physics, and I wish I'd focused more on that. That's one reason I love this book.

It is incredibly interesting and almost always easy to understand. It explains all sorts of technology - there are sections on automobiles, woodstoves, musical instruments, air conditioners, et cetera. It uses very little math, but it is written for serious reading - it's about 700 pages long, and I've been working at it for months, on and off, and am about a third of the way through.

I love it. (By the way, much modern technology does involve quantum effects, so I'm sure there is some coverage of them in this book. But it's still true that the book focuses on things we use and can hold in our hands.)