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Rainbows, Snowflakes, and Quarks : Physics and the World Around Us
Rainbows Snowflakes and Quarks Physics and the World Around Us Author:Hans Christian von Baeyer A guided tour through the world of natural phenomena that have inspired poets, painters, physicists, and philosophers through the ages. — Why is the sky blue? What is a whirlpool? How are snowflakes made? — This remarkable book answers these questions and more. It includes the story of how the Greeks speculated about gravity; how an eighteenth-cen... more »tury Russian professor became the first martyr to the science of electricity; how a medieval monk explained the rainbow; how a Dutch scientist tested the Doppler effect with the help of a band of trumpeters on a moving railroad flatcar; and the first written description of the compass (an instrument that fascinated Albert Einstein as a child) in eleventh-century China. It traces the origins of science through everyday phenomena such as whirlpools, lightning, and the colors of the sky, and thus explains the continual quest to link the inaccessible realms of the universe with the immediate world of human experience.« less