Synopsis
When will the planets align? Can it rain fish? How can you unlock the 90% of your brain that you never use? The actual answers to such questions may be different from what you would expect. In fact, the answers to many science questions can be quite surprising. In 2012, Dr. Baird began writing a series of immensely popular online articles for his website Science Questions with Surprising Answers, which were written for a general audience. He has now written over 350 of these articles. Each article takes the form of a highly-accurate answer to a particular science question, with information drawn from peer-reviewed journals, professional scientific organizations, university textbooks, and Dr. Baird's own first-hand expertise as a scientist. These articles do a marvelous job of making complex scientific concepts interesting and understandable to the average non-scientist. Of these 350+ online articles, this book contains the fifty most popular articles, as determined by the average number of article views per month. This book presents the articles in countdown fashion, ending at the number-one most popular surprising answer. Additionally, for this book, Dr. Baird has edited and expanded each of these science answers and added a bonus chapter. This ranked compilation of science questions and answers is an interesting representation of the science questions and answers that the world finds the most intriguing.
About the Author
Dr. Christopher S. Baird received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2007. Since that time, he has worked as a physics professor and research scientist specializing in electromagnetism, lasers, and quantum devices. As senior scientist and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell from 2007-2016, he taught graduate electromagnetics courses and pursued research on lasers, quantum well devices, radar imaging, and electromagnetic scattering. From 2016 to the present, Dr. Baird has worked at West Texas A&M University as tenure-track assistant professor of physics, and then as tenured associate professor of physics. In these roles he has taught various undergraduate classes and continued his research on quantum devices. Dr. Baird has authored several dozen research publications, including various classified research reports for the military. Additionally, Dr. Baird has authored sixteen manuals for university physics laboratory classes, over a dozen articles for McGraw Hill's AccessScience, and 340+ articles for his Science Questions with Surprising Answers website. He has written articles and consulting notes for general-audience publications such as Reuters, Popular Mechanics, Newsweek, National Geographic, All About Space magazine, and LiveScience. Dr. Baird has served as a peer reviewer for academic journals such as Applied Optics, The Journal of Optics, The Journal of Applied Physics, AIP Advances, Optics Letters, Applied Physics Letters, Optics Express, and IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. He has also served as a reviewer of applications for NASA fellowships, a reviewer of several grant proposals for Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and a reviewer of textbook proposals and revisions for CRC Publishing, SPIE, and McGraw-Hill. He has helped win a million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as several multimillion dollar grants from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Furthermore, Dr. Baird has served as a science judge at numerous local, regional, and national science competitions and research conferences.
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