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Search - Science In Your Life

Science In Your Life
Author: John Pfeiffer

SCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE ILLUSTRATED BY LUDWIG MACTARIAN THE PEOPLES LIBRARY New York 1939 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY THANKS DUE For help in forming and supplying information for this book and check ing its accuracy, I give special thanks to Mr. John Mills and Mr. P. C. Jones of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, New York, and to staff members of the Hayde... more »n Planetarium in the same city. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. More Power to You i II. Climate to Order 7 III. Weighing Heat n IV. On the Level 16 V. Looking Up 23 VI. Things You Never Saw 28 VII. Madhouse of Molecules 33 VIII. The Bodys Instruments 38 IX. Louder Than Ever 41 X. What You Hear 46 XL More Than Meets the Eye 51 XII. Bending Light 55 XIII. For a Closer Look 59 XIV. Light Gets There Just the Same 64 XV. What Atoms Are Made of 70 XVI. Quick As a Flash 74 XVII. Watching the Compass 79 XVIII. Pulling Together 83 XIX. Power Enough 88 XX. Power in the Air 94 XXI. Singing Waves 98 XXII. The Power to Kill 104 CHAPTER I MORE POWER TO YOU THERE is a shaft in the side of an ancient Egyptian pyramid. At the beginning of every year, when the Nile started overflowing, Sirius, the dog star, rose in the sky. The pyramid was so located that the rays of this star traveled straight through the shafts open ing and down along the stone corridor until they lit the head of the dead Pharaoh in his tomb. The Egyptians had to know a good deal about mathematics and astronomy to build a pyramid in this way yet we have no records of their scientific wisdom. The laws they used for building and calculating are unknown to us, and, indeed, they were unknown to most of the Egyptians. Science was the closely guarded secret of priests and soothsayers. Modern science has machinery that could build a thousand pyramids in the time it took hundreds of thousands of sweating Egyptian slaves to build one and it has no secrets. The bars to knowledge have been let down. Almost anyone who wants to study science can find good courses he can afford. Anyone at all can use the libraries where the worlds store of scientific knowledge is set down in books. And the machinery of science, which took thousands of years to develop, is at your service every hour. We buy science. It is no longer the business only of scientists and those others who study for the pleasure of it, but a part of everyones practical equipment for under standing the world he lives in. The heaviest load a human being ever lifted with his hands weighed about 1,400 pounds. Yet, you your self can lift a 3OO, ooo-pound locomotive and swing it through the air with the greatest of ease if you use a derrick. The worlds record for the loo-yard dash is a bit under ten seconds but with an airplane going 440 miles an hour you would be doing the hundred in half a second flat. As it has increased our power and speed, so science l as ygtstly jmprovqft oiiT-jsensg. The most keen-eyed among us cannot make out the features of the land scape more than a few miles away. But if you peered through the new California telescope with its seven teen-foot lens and slowly turned the controls with your fingers, you would be able to bring the moon which hangs 250,000 miles out in space 5,000 times closer. You would see the jagged edges of the moons volcanic craters and its mysterious canals, almost as clearly as if they were only fifty miles away. If you are interested in very little things, instead of those that are far off, there is a microscope so powerful that it could make this exclamation point seem as large as the Washington Monument. With it your eyes could watch billions of bacteria wriggle in a single drop of water. You could increase your sense of hearing 10,000-000,000,000 ten million million times by the use of an amplifier...

ISBN-13: 9781406768565
ISBN-10: 1406768561
Publication Date: 3/15/2007
Pages: 116
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Mayo Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

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