Customer Reviews

Invention and Evolution: Design in Nature and Engineering

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a beautiful book. French talks about energy, form, mechanism, and economy in natural and man-made things. He compares birds to planes in terms of fuel-capacity, energy conversion efficiency, drag, etc. He compares suspension bridges and dinosaurs. He provides examples of neat inventions and the thought that has gone into them (every- thing from steam-catapults to toy cars to grommets). This is "How Things Work" for the non-moron crowd.

I used this for a design in nature course, yet we ended up spending more time reading journals than really covering any material in the book. Why? Because this book is only useful as a primer for the thought of doing a design by looking at nature. I didn't really learn or gain any real information by reading this book except for the concept that you can make a very highly simplified assumption of a design created by nature to solve a problem. For instance, there is nothing more complicated than saying that you can approximate the jump of a grasshopper by a single linear spring or understand that if you look at a wing of a bird you find a similar shape as what you could use on an airplane. This isn't for "the smart crowd" as stated by the previous reviewer. Anybody with a high school physics education could easily understand it but in my personal opinion you're better off finding more inspiration from a popular mechanics magazine.