Table of Contents
Preface vii
Color Inset xiv
Part 1 Outdoor physics 1
Chapter 1 Meandering down to the sea 5
Chapter 2 Rivers from lakes 13
Chapter 3 The oceanic phone booth 15
Chapter 4 In the blue 25
Chapter 5 The moon-glades 37
Chapter 6 The Foucault pendulum and the Baer law 41
Chapter 7 The moon-brake 51
Part 2 Saturday night physics 55
Chapter 8 Why the violin sings 59
Chapter 9 The chiming and silent goblets 67
Chapter 10 The bubble and the droplet 75
Chapter 11 The mysteries of the magic lamp 89
Chapter 12 The water mic or about one invention of Alexander Bell's 99
Chapter 13 How waves transmit information 105
Chapter 14 Why electric power lines are droning 113
Chapter 15 The footprints on the sand 117
Chapter 16 How to prevent snowdrifts? 129
Chapter 17 The incident on the train 133
Part 3 Physics in the kitchen 139
Chapter 18 Craving microwaved mammoth 143
Chapter 19 The physics of baking good pizza 155
Chapter 20 Boiling, steaming, or rinsing? 171
Chapter 21 The mystery of the Christmas turkey 185
Chapter 22 Macaroni, spaghetti, and physics 189
Chapter 23 Ab(out) ovo 201
Chapter 24 Waiting for the kettle to boil 209
Chapter 25 The physics of good coffee 225
Chapter 26 "Nunc est bibendum": physicists talk around glasses of wine 241
Part 4 Windows to the quantum world 259
Chapter 27 The birth of new physics at the turn of the century 263
Chapter 28 The uncertainty principle 275
Chapter 29 On snowballs, nuts, bubbles and… liquid helium 285
Chapter 30 Superconductivity: a century of discoveries, dreams, and disappointments 293
Chapter 31 What is a SQUID? 315
Chapter 32 Superconducting magnets 327
Chapter 33 What is magnetic resonance imaging? 339
Chapter 34 Towards a quantum computer 349
Chapter 35 A great but terrible nuclear energy 365
Afterword 373
Index 375
About the authors 379
