Scientific American: How Things Work Today - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375410236 ISBN 13: 9780375410239

Publisher: Crown, 2000

Synopsis

Biotechnology, computers, cell phones, and the Internet -- they're all having a major impact on our lives as the twenty-first century begins. Surrounded by today's array of new technologies, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and bewildered. For more than a century, Scientific American has made the machines and technologies that make up our world understandable. In Scientific American: How Things Work Today you'll find over 100 topics explored in easy-to-understand text and made absolutely clear with the aid of more than 600 fully annotated, three-dimensional illustrations and color photographs.

Do you know where all those stairs on the escalator go when they get to the top? Did you know that every time you use a credit card the clerk bounces a signal off a satellite to get an okay for your purchase? Have you ever wondered how your e-mail gets from here to there? Or how the signal finds your cell phone when you're hundreds of miles from home? Scientific American knows, and in Scientific American: How Things Work Today, it tells and shows you how the world around you works, with three-dimensional illustrations, diagrams, and exploded views as well as up-to-the-minute color photographs. And the explanations are in the concise, understandable language that has made Scientific American the most successful popular science magazine in the world.

Scientific American has been the authoritative popular source of science information about how the world works for more than 150 years. Now, in the first book based on the magazine's popular "Working Knowledge" column, Scientific American reveals exactly how the wonders of the modern world work. Assembled by a team of professional science and technology writers, Scientific American: How Things Work Today shows the hidden workings of satellites, the Space Shuttle, subways, sewers, the Internet, electron microscopes, and many of the other systems and devices that help make our world what it is and us who we are. With lavish pictures, photographs, and hundreds of explanations to how our world works, this book is an essential addition to every family's library.

About this title

Review:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," wrote Arthur C. Clarke. The technology that surrounds us now, at the dawn of the 21st century, can seem plenty advanced: a plethora of black (or light gray) boxes doing who knows what to send voices through the air, see pictures in crystal tubes, fly like a bird. We're calling spirits from the vastly deep, and they really come.

If you'd prefer not to do magic, though, this is the book for you. How does a GPS receiver know where you are? What's inside the "not user serviceable" parts of a laser printer? What's the difference between scanning and transmission electron microscopes? The explanations and diagrams in this volume are in Scientific American's distinctive style, clear and simple without being oversimplified. It's not as cute or congenial as David Macauley's The New Way Things Work, but the multicolored pictures are easier to follow and the volume is more information-dense. If you like your technology slightly drier, more technical, and less magical than Macauley provides, How Things Work Today is an excellent guide. --Mary Ellen Curtin

About the Author:

MICHAEL WRIGHT studied natural sciences at Cambridge University and has been a freelance writer and editor in the areas of science, technology, and medicine for many years. He has also written on everything from health to horticulture, household pets to history, from food and drink to photography.

M. N. PATEL is an editor and writer specializing in science and technology. He studied natural, social, and political sciences at Cambridge University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375410236
• ISBN 13: 9780375410239
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Wright Michael, Patel Mukul