| Description |
1 online resource (205 pages) |
| Contents |
Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgments; 1 Fun with Physical Paradoxes, Puzzles, and Problems; 1.1 Introduction; 1.2 Background; 1.3 Sources; 2 Outer Space Paradoxes; 2.1 A Helium Balloon in a Space Shuttle; 2.2 Space Navigation without Jets; 2.3 A Paradox with a Comet; 2.4 Speeding Up Causes a Slowdown; 3 Paradoxes with Spinning Water; 3.1 A Puzzle with a Floating Cork; 3.2 Parabolic Mirrors and Two Kitchen Puzzles; 3.3 A Cold Parabolic Dish; 3.4 Boating on a Slope; 3.5 Navigating with No Engine or Sails; 3.6 The Icebergs; 4 Floating and Diving Paradoxes; 4.1 A Bathtub on Wheels |
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4.2 The Tub Problem-In More Depth4.3 How to Lose Weight in a Fraction of a Second; 4.4 An Underwater Balloon; 4.5 A Scuba Puzzle; 4.6 A Weight Puzzle; 5 Flows and Jets; 5.1 Bernoulli's Law and Water Guns; 5.2 Sucking on a Straw and the Irreversibility of Time; 5.3 Bernoulli's Law and Moving Around in a Space Shuttle; 5.4 A Sprinker Puzzle; 5.5 Ejecting Water Fast but with Zero Speed?; 5.6 A Pouring Water Puzzle; 5.7 A Stirring Paradox; 5.8 An Inkjet Printer Question; 5.9 A Vorticity Paradox; 6 Moving Experiences: Bikes, Gymnastics, Rockets; 6.1 How Do Swings Work?; 6.2 The Rising Energy Cost |
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6.3 A Gymnast Doing Giants and a Hamster in a Wheel6.4 Controlling a Car on Ice; 6.5 How Does a Biker Turn?; 6.6 Speeding Up by Leaning; 6.7 Can One Gain Speed on a Bike by Body Motion Only?; 6.8 Gaining Weight on a Motorbike; 6.9 Feeling the Square in (mv[sup(2)]/2) Through the Bike Pedals; 6.10 A Paradox with Rockets; 6.11 A Coffee Rocket; 6.12 Throwing a Ball from a Moving Car; 7 Paradoxes with the Coriolis Force; 7.1 What Is the Coriolis Force?; 7.2 Feeling Coriolis in a Boeing 747; 7.3 Down the Drain with Coriolis; 7.4 High Pressure and Good Weather; 7.5 What Causes Trade Winds? |
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8 Centrifugal Paradoxes8.1 What's Cheaper: Flying West or East?; 8.2 A Coriolis Paradox; 8.3 An Amazing Inverted Pendulum: What Holds It Up?; 8.4 Antigravity Molasses; 8.5 The ""Proof"" That the Sling Cannot Work; 8.6 A David-Goliath Problem; 8.7 Water in a Pipe; 8.8 Which Tension Is Greater?; 8.9 Slithering Ropes in Weightlessness; 9 Gyroscopic Paradoxes; 9.1 How Does the Spinning Top Defy Gravity?; 9.2 Gyroscopes in Bikes; 9.3 A Rolling Coin; 9.4 Staying on a Slippery Dome; 9.5 Finding North with a Gyroscope; 10 Some Hot Stuff and Cool Things |
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10.1 Can Heat Pass from a Colder to a Hotter Object?10.2 A Bike Pump and Molecular Ping-Pong; 10.3 A Bike Pump as a Heat Pump; 10.4 Heating a Room in Winter; 10.5 Freezing Things with a Bike Tire; 11 Two Perpetual Motion Machines; 11.1 Perpetual Motion by Capillarity; 11.2 An Elliptical Mirror Perpetuum Mobile; 12 Sailing and Gliding; 12.1 Shooting Cherry Pits and Sailing; 12.2 Sailing Straight into the Wind; 12.3 Biking against the Wind; 12.4 Soaring without Updrafts; 12.5 Danger of the Horizontal Shear Wind; 13 The Flipping Cat and the Spinning Earth |
| Summary |
Ever wonder why cats land on their feet? Or what holds a spinning top upright? Or whether it is possible to feel the Earth's rotation in an airplane? Why Cats Land on Their Feet is a compendium of paradoxes and puzzles that readers can solve using their own physical intuition. And the surprising answers to virtually all of these astonishing paradoxes can be arrived at with no formal knowledge of physics. Mark Levi introduces each physical problem, sometimes gives a hint or two, and then fully explains the solution. Here readers can test their critical-thinking skills against a |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Science -- Miscellanea
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Science
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| Genre/Form |
Trivia and miscellanea
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9781400841721 |
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1400841720 |
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0691148546 |
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9780691148540 |
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