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    Atoms Under the Floorboards: The Surprising Science Hidden in Your Home
    Unavailable
    Atoms Under the Floorboards: The Surprising Science Hidden in Your Home
    Unavailable
    Atoms Under the Floorboards: The Surprising Science Hidden in Your Home
    Ebook453 pages4 hours

    Atoms Under the Floorboards: The Surprising Science Hidden in Your Home

    By Chris Woodford

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Using the modern home as a springboard, Atoms under the Floorboards introduces the reader to the fascinating and surprising scientific explanations behind a variety of common (and often entertainingly mundane) household phenomena, from gurgling drains and squeaky floorboards to rubbery custard and shiny shoes.

    Packed with facts and fun, each chapter focuses on a feature in each of the areas and slowly unpicks the science behind it.

    * Is it better to build skyscrapers like wobbly jellies or stacks of biscuits?
    *Can you burn your house down with an electric drill?
    *How many atoms would you have to split to power a lightbulb?
    *How can a raincoat be waterproof and breathable at the same time?

    Atoms under the Floorboards answers all these questions, and hundreds more. You'll never look at your home the same way again ...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMar 12, 2015
    ISBN9781472912244
    Unavailable
    Atoms Under the Floorboards: The Surprising Science Hidden in Your Home
    Author

    Chris Woodford

    Chris Woodford has been a professional science and technology writer for 25 years. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in natural sciences, he has gone on to write, co-write and edit a number of science education books, including the best-selling Cool Stuff series. He runs www.explainthatstuff.com, dedicated to explaining the science behind familiar, everyday things.

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    Reviews for Atoms Under the Floorboards

    4/5

    8 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book contains all the information that we "learned" in science class in school and/or at the science museum and forgot soon afterwards. Going back as an adult with more experience in the world, the innovations and discoveries in this book can be related to your experiences, making the information more interesting and relevant to our lives. I'm giving it a 3 because it took me so long to read, which means it could've been more interesting. Irrelevant information creeps up every chapter and the sidebars say almost the same thing as the main text.

      Just one note for American readers: the author is British and measurements are metric, so you have to think a little harder regarding specific locations and read the parentheses to know how many miles x number of km is. Some people find that annoying, but I like getting information from people who aren't American every now and then.

      My food for thought quote: "What are you actually like? Can you sum yourself up in nothing but numbers? And, if the answer is 'no', why do we suppose we can compress a Picasso painting into digital photos or squash a Beethoven piano sonata into an MP3 file?"
    • 4/5
      There’s a reason for everything and everything is explainable. From bicycle wheels to dust on the bookshelf, everything has a story. Chris Woodford is the kind of person who has to understand everything inside out. I had a friend whose wife feared to bring anything home because she knew he would seize it and dismantle it and put it back together only after he was satisfied he understood exactly how it worked. Then maybe she could use it. I got the same feeling reading Atoms Under the Floorboards. Woodford has been this way all his life, and he relates stories from his childhood to prove it. It’s very user friendly and entertaining.There are fascinating insights into things we take for granted (pretty much everything) like why our fingers wrinkle when soaked a long time, how self-cleaning windows do their thing, or how the three different types of glue work and their resulting advantages and problems. I also appreciated his description of atoms as nothing like the artwork we’re used to seeing. They’re more like a speck of dirt at center field in a stadium. He manages to avoid most of the math, replacing it with stories and illustrations that make the journey fascinating. He combines a childlike fascination with scientific curiosity.My favorite story concerns tea leaves and why they concentrate in the center of the cup instead of covering the entire bottom. The answer was provided in a scientific paper by a certain A. Einstein in 1926. Blissfully, there an index in Atoms Under the Floorboards, so you can look at what’s happening when you are faced with the issue at hand.David Wineberg