How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the Ordinary

By explaining the physics behind ordinary objects, this book unravels the mysteries of how things work. Using familiar examples from everyday life and modern technology, this book explains the seemingly inexplicable phenomena we encounter all around us. As it examines everything from roller coasters to radio, musical instruments to makeup, and knuckleballs to nuclear weapons, How Everything Works provides the answers to such questions as why the sky is blue, why metal is a problem in microwave ovens, and why some clothes require dry cleaning. With fascinating and fun real-life examples that provide the answers to scores of questions, How Everything Works is nothing short of a user's manual to our everyday world.

About the author

Louis A. Bloomfield is Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia. He also works extensively with professional societies and the media to explain physics to the general public. He maintains a website where he answers a wide range of questions on physics. Bloomfield received his Ph.D. from Stanford and was a postdoctoral fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Bloomfield has been widely recognized for his teaching of physics and science to thousands of non-science students at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a 1998 State of Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award and the 2001 Pegram Medal of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society. He is the author of almost 100 publications in the fields of atomic clusters, autoionizing states, high-resolution laser spectroscopy, nonlinear optics, computer science, and general science literacy, and of the successful introductory textbook How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life, 3rd Edition (Wiley 2006).