Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #109656 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-22
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Synopsis
This book brings some of the finest scientific brains to bear on those tantalising queries for which you thought you'd never find an answer. It is a book for the naturally curious; it unravels things we take for granted, like, when you boil an egg, why does the yolk stay in the middle? In an age when science reaches new conclusions and makes dramatic discoveries almost weekly, there still remain fundamental, simple and often obvious questions to occupy an interested and curious mind. Such as: why do bums look smaller dressed in black? Or, if you were to write in the dust on the moon, how big would the letters have to be so you could see them from earth without a telescope? In this book, you get the answers to all the questions posed so far. No question, provided there is a proper scientific conclusion, is too ridiculous to appear between the covers. It will satisfy the curious, and amuse the browser.

Customer Reviews

Enjoyable enough read but peppered with inaccuracies
It's a perfectly fun book to dip into and easy enough to read, but there are too many factual errors, evidence of lack of proof-reading and generally simply not answering the questions, for a pedantic scientist to be able to entirely enjoy it.

Examples:
- claiming nettles sting with formic acid
- confusing galaxies with the universe
- claiming the distant planet Sedna is a mere 10 million miles from the Sun
- determining fingernail growth of 0.5mm/week to be 2.16mm/month, ignoring significant figures

Ultimately it mainly does what it says on the tin in terms of its recycling of the source material, but that source material really should have been checked better.