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by Grimvall, Garan

• ISBN13: 9780801897177
• ISBN10: 0801897173
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-04
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

Göran Grimvall is determined to help mere mortals understand how scientists get to the kernel of perplexing problems. Entertaining and enlightening, his latest book uses examples from sports, literature, and nature -- as well as from the varied worlds of science -- to illustrate how scientists make sense of and explain the world around us.Grimvall's fun-to-read essays and easy-to-follow examples detail how order-of-magnitude estimation, extreme cases, dimensional analysis, and other modeling methods work. They also reveal how nonscientists absorb these concepts and use them at home, school, and work.Grimvall's simple, elegant explanations will help you tap into your inner scientist. Read this book and enjoy your own "Aha!" moment.

Author Biography

Gran Grimvall is professor emeritus of physics at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. An elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, he is the author of a number of popular physics books, including Brainteaser Physics, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Numbers	p. 1
Numerical Literacy	p. 1
Babylon, Babble, and Billion	p. 1
Prefixes	p. 3
What Is the Point?	p. 5
The Power of Logarithms	p. 7
Order of Magnitude	p. 7
Hot Air Balloons and Renard Numbers	p. 9
Finding Fraud in Figures	p. 11
What Is Typical?	p. 14
The Height of an Adult	p. 14
Social Competence and Personal Encounters	p. 17
Hit by Returning Rocket	p. 19
Estimates	p. 21
Is Anybody Out There?	p. 21
Sand, Sibyl, Olympic Medals, and Homeopathy	p. 24
Cover the Earth with Paper	p. 27
Measures	p. 30
What Is It on a Scale?	p. 30
The Richter Scale	p. 30
Nuclear Incidents and Accidents	p. 32
Natural Threats	p. 35
Comparing Apples and Oranges	p. 38
Human Well-Being and Poverty	p. 38
Track and Field	p. 40
At Scout Camp	p. 42
Units	p. 44
Going Metric-Inch by Inch	p. 44
Horsepower and Manpower	p. 46
The Loss of a Spacecraft	p. 48
On the Road	p. 51
Left-Hand Traffic	p. 51
The Value of a Life	p. 53
Gasoline Here and There	p. 55
Accuracy and Significance	p. 58
Could You Be More Precise, Please?	p. 58
What Is Austria's Population?	p. 58
A Slim Waist	p. 59
Man on the Moon	p. 62
Significant?	p. 64
Flunking	p. 64
A Change in Opinion	p. 66
Error Bars	p. 68
Limit Values	p. 71
Will Your iPod Make You Deaf?	p. 71
Lethal Dose	p. 73
The Weakest Link	p. 75
Fair Games?	p. 79
Winning by a Small Margin	p. 79
Accurate Timing	p. 81
Are All Sports Venues Equivalent?	p. 83
Extrapolations	p. 86
The Dangerous Exponential	p. 86
The Rule of 72	p. 86
A Problematic Reward	p. 87
Suddenly Nothing Was Left	p. 90
The Ubiquitous Straight Line	p. 92
Dubious Extrapolations	p. 92
Moore's Law	p. 94
Low Radiation Level and Cancer	p. 96
Scaling	p. 99
Big and Small Fish	p. 99
Gulliver	p. 100
Roasting a Turkey	p. 102
Looking Ahead	p. 104
The Law of Diminishing Returns	p. 104
The Sign of the Second Derivative	p. 106
Lynx and Hare	p. 109
Models	p. 112
What Are the Chances?	p. 112
Proofreading	p. 112
Losing a Leg	p. 113
Sunday Traffic	p. 115
Seeking the Optimum	p. 117
Tax Rates and the Autobahn	p. 117
Running to the Rescue	p. 119
Selecting the Best Golf Club	p. 121
Focus on the Essential	p. 124
How Small Can a Mouse Be?	p. 124
The Age of the Earth	p. 126
A Loud Party	p. 128
A Law or a Model?	p. 130
Ohm's Law Is Not a Law	p. 130
A Mad Pursuit	p. 132
Is Coulomb's Law Exact?	p. 135
The Real World	p. 138
Plausible, but Not Correct	p. 138
The Unridable Bicycle	p. 138
Church Windows and Lead Roofs	p. 140
The Bathtub Vortex	p. 142
You See What You Want to See	p. 145
Waves Are Rolling In	p. 145
Galileo Galilei's Trial	p. 147
Submarines and Mink	p. 148
Suddenly Something Happens	p. 151
Fishing Nets, Coffee Percolators, and the Web	p. 151
Goethe and the Height of Trees	p. 153
Supercooled Rain and Critical Mass	p. 156
Engineering versus Science	p. 158
Slapstick	p. 158
Not a Schoolbook Problem	p. 160
Hoisting a Sack	p. 163
Tricks of the Trade	p. 166
A Crash Course in Science Thinking	p. 166
Dinghy, Anchor, and Pool	p. 166
Up and Down the Escalator	p. 168
The Floating Apple	p. 170
Is the Formula Accurate Enough?	p. 172
Obesity	p. 172
Wind Chill Temperature	p. 174
The Size of a Ship	p. 176
Characteristic Quantities	p. 178
How Deep Is Deep?	p. 178
The Coldest Day of the Year	p. 180
Galileo Galilei, Basketball, and Table Tennis	p. 182
Impress Them!	p. 184
What Is Your BMI?	p. 184
The Aeolian Harp	p. 186
One Trick and Two Areas	p. 188
Epilogue: Seven Principles in Scientific Literacy	p. 191
Notes	p. 199
Index	p. 211
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