Hidden Wonders

The hidden elegance in everyday objects and physical mechanisms, from crumpled paper to sandcastles. Hidden Wonders focuses on the objects that populate our everyday life-crumpled paper, woven fabric, a sand pile-but looks at them with a physicists' eye, revealing a hidden elegance in mundane physical mechanisms. In six chapters-Builders, Creating Shapes, Building with Threads, From Sand to Glass, Matter in Motion, and Fractures-the authors present brief stories, set in locales ranging from the Eiffel Tower to a sandcastle, that illustrate the little wonders hidden in the ordinary. A simple experiment that readers can perform at home concludes each story. More than 200 illustrations bring the stories to life.