1118994353 How Things Work Physics Everyday Life.pdf

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HOW THINGS WORK

T H E P H Y S I C S O F E V E R Y D AY L I F E

SIXTH EDITION

LOUIS A. BLOOMFIELD

EDITION

How

Things

Work

THE PHYSICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Louis A. Bloomfield

The University of Virginia

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bloomfield, Louis, author.

Title: How things work : the physics of everyday life / Louis A. Bloomfield,

The University of Virginia.

Description: Sixth edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2015] |

?2016 | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015033708| ISBN 9781119013846 (loose-leaf : alk. paper) |

ISBN 1119013844 (loose-leaf: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Physics—Textbooks.

Classification: LCC QC21.3 .B56 2015 | DDC 530—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033708

ISBN

978-1119-01384-6

(Binder Version)

The inside back cover will contain printing identification and country of origin if omitted from this page. In addition, if the ISBN on the back

cover differs from the ISBN on this page, the one on the back cover is correct.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Foreword

n today’s world we are surrounded by science and by

the technology that has grown out of that science. For

most of us, this is making the world increasingly mys-

terious and somewhat ominous as technology becomes

ever more powerful. For instance, we are confronted by

many global environmental questions such as the dan-

gers of greenhouse gases and the best choices of energy

sources. These are questions that are fundamentally tech-

nical in nature and there is a bewildering variety of claims

and counterclaims as to what is “the truth” on these and

similar important scientific issues. For many people, the

reaction is to throw up their hands in hopeless frustration

and accept that the modern world is impossible to under-

stand and one can only huddle in helpless ignorance at the

mercy of its mysterious and inexplicable behavior.

In fact, much of the world around us and the technol-

ogy of our everyday lives is governed by a few basic

physics principles, and once these principles are under-

stood, the world and the vast array of technology in our

lives become understandable and predictable. How does

your microwave oven heat up food? Why is your radio

reception bad in some places and not others? And why

can birds happily land on a high-voltage electrical wire?

The answers to questions like these are obvious once you

know the relevant physics. Unfortunately, you are not

likely to learn that from a standard physics course or

physics textbook. There is a large body of research show-

ing that, instead of providing this improved understanding of

everyday life, most introductory physics courses are

doing quite the opposite. In spite of the best intentions of

the teachers, most students are “learning” that physics is

abstract, uninteresting, and unrelated to the world around

them.

How Things Work

is a dramatic step toward changing

that by presenting physics in a new way. Instead of start-

ing out with abstract principles that leave the reader with

the idea that physics is about artificial and uninteresting

ideas, Lou Bloomfield starts out talking about real objects

and devices that we encounter in our everyday lives. He

then shows how these seemingly magical devices can be

understood in terms of the basic physics principles that

govern their behavior. This is much the way that most

physics was discovered in the first place: people asked

why the world around them behaved as it did and as a

result discovered the principles that explained and pre-

dicted what they observed.

I have been using this book in my classes for several

years, and I continue to be impressed with how Lou can

take seemingly highly complex devices and strip away

the complexity to show how at their heart are simple

physics ideas. Once these ideas are understood, they can

be used to understand the behavior of many devices we

encounter in our daily lives, and often even fix things that

before had seemed impossibly complex. In the process of

teaching from this book, I have increased my own under-

standing of the physics behind much of the world around

me. In fact, after consulting

How Things Work,

I have had

the confidence to confront both plumbers and aircondi-

tioner repairmen to tell them (correctly as it turned out)

that their diagnosis did not make sense and they needed to

do something different to solve my plumbing and AC

problems. Now I am regularly amused at the misconcep-

tions some trained physicists have about some of the

physics they encounter in their daily lives, such as how a

microwave oven works and why it can be made out of

metal walls, but putting aluminum foil in it is bad. It has

convinced me that we need to take the approach used in

this book in far more of our science texts.

Of course, the most important impact is on the stu-

dents in my classes that use this book. These are typically

nonscience students majoring in fields such as film

studies, classics, English, business, etc. They often come

to physics with considerable trepidation. It is inspiring to

see many of them discover to their surprise that physics is

very different from what they thought—that physics can

actually be interesting and useful and makes the world a

much less mysterious and more understandable place. I

remember many examples of seeing this in action: the

student who, after learning how both speakers and TVs

work, was suddenly able to understand that it was not

magic that putting his large speaker next to the TV dis-

torted the picture but in fact it was just physics, and now

he knew just how to fix it; the young woman scuba diver

who, after learning about light and color, suddenly interrupted

class to announce that now she understood why it was

that you could tell how deep you were by seeing what

color lobsters appeared; or the students who announced

that suddenly it made sense that the showers on the first

floor of the dorm worked better than those on the second

floor. In addition, of course everyone is excited to learn

how a microwave oven works and why there are these

strange rules as to what you can and cannot put in it.

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