Hidden Wonders The Subtle Dialogue Between Physics and Elegance

The hidden elegance in everyday objects and physical mechanisms, from crumpled paper to sandcastles.

Hidden Wonders focuses on the objects that populate our everyday life--crumpled paper, woven fabric, a sand pile--but looks at them with a physicist's eye, revealing a hidden elegance in mundane physical mechanisms. In six chapters--Builders, Creating Shapes, Building with Threads, From Sand to Glass, Matter in Motion, and Fractures--the authors present brief stories, set in locales ranging from the Eiffel Tower to a sandcastle, that illustrate the little wonders hidden in the ordinary. A simple experiment that readers can perform at home concludes each story. More than 200 illustrations bring the stories to life.

Étienne Guyon is Emeritus Professor at ESPCI (Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution), a fellow of the American Physical society and of the Institute of Physics, Honorary Director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and coauthor of Built on Sand: The Science of Granular Materials (MIT Press). José Bico is Associate Professor at ESPCI-PSL (Paris Science Lettres Université). Etienne Reyssat and Benoît Roman are CNRS researchers. All authors work at PMMH (Physics and Mechanics of Heterogenous Media) lab of ESPCI-PSL in Sorbonne Université.

Preface ................................................................................... vi
I. BUILDERS ...........................................................1
The Elegance of Small and Slender Things................................2
Azay-le-Rideau or Roofs of Beauty........................................... 10
The Eiffel Tower......................................................................... 18
Inner Balance..............................................................................26
Surface Tension ..........................................................................34
II. CREATING SHAPES.............................43
And We Think of Bubbles as Fragile!.......................................44
The Tragedy of Foam .................................................................52
Necklaces and Catenaries..........................................................60
Elegant Stone Arches.................................................................68
Shells and Mille-Feuilles ........................................................ 76
III. BUILDING WITH THREAD ........85
An Eight-Legged Builder..........................................................86
Wet Hair.....................................................................................94
Birds as Architects ...................................................................104
An Impressive Bridge of Grasses..............................................114
Folders and Tailors: Masters of Volume.................................. 122
Weaving and Braiding ............................................................. 132
Folding and Crumpling Paper Balls........................................ 142
IV. FROM SAND TO GLASS............... 153
Seeing a World in a Grain of Sand.......................................... 154
The Secret of Sandcastles......................................................... 162
Earthen Architecture............................................................... 172
Liquid Stone: Concrete ............................................................ 180
The Saga of Fusing Granular Matter....................................... 188
States of Glass .......................................................................... 196
V. MATTER IN MOTION......................... 205
Beams Bend but Do Not Break...............................................206
Vaulting into the Air................................................................ 216
The Choreography of Pine Cones............................................. 224
Flying Seeds............................................................................. 232
Quaking Bows.......................................................................... 242
Uppity Grains of Sand ............................................................. 252
VI. FRACTURES .............................................261
Prehistoric Gems ..................................................................... 262
Pointed Tears ........................................................................... 270
The Geometry of Lettuce ....................................................... 278
Eloquent Craquelures ..............................................................286
Walking on Eggs ....................................................................294
Glass Teardrops .......................................................................302
Glossary .................................................................................... 310
Reading List............................................................................. 312
Acknowledgments.................................................................... 313