The Science of Spin
How Rotational Forces Affect Everything from Your Body to Jet Engines to the Weather
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- ¥1,800
Publisher Description
What exactly made the earth round? How do boomerangs turn around mid-air? And why do cats always land on their feet? “A basic scientific concept receives long overdue attention” (Kirkus Reviews) in this “fascinating” (Wall Street Journal) new book from the masterful author of The Age of Wood.
From the solar system to spinning tops, hurricanes to hula hoops, power plants to pendulums, one mysterious force shapes almost every aspect of our lives: spin. Despite its ubiquity, rotational force continues to baffle and surprise, and few people realize how it makes our planet habitable or how it has been tamed by engineers to make our lives more comfortable. Charting the development of engineering and technology from the earliest prehistoric drills to the gas turbine, critically acclaimed author and scientist Roland Ennos presents a riveting account of human ingenuity and the seemingly infinite ways spin affects our daily lives. He also shows how this new approach not only helps us better understand the world but also ourselves. After all, even our own bodies are complex systems of rotating joints and levers.
Artfully moving between astrophysics and anthropology, The Science of Spin shows how, whether natural or engineered, spin is really what makes the world go round.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Spin pervades all aspects of the world around us," according to this frustrating survey. Ennos (The Age of Wood), a biology professor at the University of Hull, England, explores spin's role in such diverse phenomena as the operation of turbine engines, the movement of yo-yos, and the orbits of planets. He explains that the gravitational pull of the moon "sweep the seas across the globe" in the opposite direction of Earth's rotation, slowing how fast the planet spins on its axis and elongating days by 2.3 milliseconds per century. Other insights are harder to follow. The author's account of how the invention of the flying shuttle in 1732 improved the productivity of looms will be lost on anyone who isn't intimately familiar with the machines, and the description of how humans stay balanced by rotating their ankles expects readers to recognize precise anatomical terminology ("We relax our gastrocnemius muscles and contract our tibialis anterior muscles"). Additionally, the extended discussion of how "the hegemony of mathematics... has greatly obstructed the progress of science" by obscuring intuitive findings and repelling people "unwilling to grind their way through" complicated equations feels out of place. This will make readers' heads spin.
