| |
| The
Bluffer's Guide to Science | | By
Brian Malpass | | | | Extracts
from the book | |
| | | Impossibility |
| If
ever a truly eminent man of science over the age of fifty-five pronounces with
great conviction that something is impossible, it is a safe bet that he will be
proved wrong shortly. | | |
| Ad
infinitum | | Although
it has not been conclusively proven, there are those who believe that quarks may
not be points occupying no space, which would mean that they in turn were made
up of even smaller particles. This would come as no surprise to the bluffer, who
worships the dictum: 'Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite em,
and little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum'. |
| | | White
hot | | It
is ironic that among his legacies is Newton's Law of Cooling, for the man himself
passed the greater part of his life in a state of self-stoked white-hot incandescence. |
| | | Twaddel |
| The
only unit of measurement more oddly named than the slug-foot-second which is used
in British aerodynamics, is the twaddel, a scale named after W. Twaddel which
is used to measure the relative density of liquids. Frankly, it's wasted on that. |
| | | Kudos |
| Perhaps
the ultimate sign that you have arrived in science is to have a unit of measurement
named after you, although it can take 200 years for recognition to arrive, which
lessens its value to the individual concerned. Examples include the coulomb, gauss,
ohm, oersted, volt, newton and twaddel. | | |
| Reviews |
|
| | | You
should not study bluffing in science on a train or bus if laughing out loud in
public embarrasses you. | | The
Journal of the British Astronomical Association |
| | Never
again will you be silenced in the pub by the bore who knows all about Einstein.
Instead you can enthral dinner party guests by dropping into casual conversation
stories which reveal your deep scientific knowledge. Like, for example, the fact
that the standard unit of force, the Newton, is about the force required to lift
the average apple.
This little paperback also gives you the
low-down on the famous people of science. Now you can tell your friends that Newton
was so bad-tempered that he once threatened to incinerate his mother and stepfather.
And Sir Peter Medawar, who won a Nobel prize in 1960 for his work on immunology,
wrote an autobiography called Memoir of a Thinking Radish... |
| Evening
Echo | | |
| Table
of Contents | |
| | |
What Science
is How
to Recognise a Scientist Succeeding
in Science The
Growth of Science
The Scientific Method
Who is Top at Science
Whither Science? Scientific
Issues
The Big Bang
GUTS
New Materials
The Origins of Life
Energy
The Standard Model Who's
Who in Science
Archimedes
Aristotle
Niels Bohr
Robert Boyle
Nicolaus Copernicus
John Dalton
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
Albert Einstein
Michael Faraday
Richard Feynman
Galileo
J. Willard
Gibbs
Stephen Hawking
Werner Heisenberg
Sir Fred Hoyle
Lord Kelvin
Johannes Kepler
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
James Clerk Maxwell
Sir
Peter Medawar
Abbé Gregor Mendel
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev
Sir Isaac Newton
Louis Pasteur
Wolfgang Pauli
Max Planck
Linus
Pauling Odd
Facts Glossary
| | |
| |
Fortune
Telling
