Reviews for Butter Side up!: The Delights of Science - Magnus Pyke - Library Binding

The average rating for Butter Side up!: The Delights of Science - Magnus Pyke - Library Binding based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-08-07 00:00:00 John Filla Update: 10/3/17 I've known for more than a decade that people around the equator get some 30% fewer cases of some cancers. I learned that from a research project at Harvard, which mentioned that this fact has been known since the 1970s. This book gave me yet another way to explain the difference. Pyke mentions that people who spend much of their time indoors may be breathing bad air. It's possible that people around the equator simply spend less time indoors. There is another possibility. It's my guess that people around the equator eat more fruit. That might explain the different rate for at least one cancer which is less common around the equator. Linus Pauling, the chemist who won 2 Nobel Prizes, used to recommend massive daily doses of Vitamin C. He lived to be an old man, whatever that means. New review policy: frontload reviews with what's valuable first. Magnus Pyke started out as a food scientist in wartime. Hence his focus on chemistry. He seems to be right about spinach being worthless, as mentioned in the updates. I kept thinking that he sounded a lot like the scientist who invented Ice 9 in the book "Cat's Cradle." He comes very close, talking for an entire chapter about Thixotropic substances such as ketchup, blood, and clay. Imagine a clay-based substance that's hard enough for an army to cross, but can be churned behind you into an unnavigable, jelly-like substance. Also, if it's true that blood generally gets thicker when there's injury to the body, might it explain why heart attacks follow psychological injury too? He has a fascinating chapter about Foucalt's pendulum and its applications, starting with gyroscopes which can automatically steer airplanes, etc. This leads to a discussion of how boomerangs have gyroscopic properties, and how the curvature of a boomerang serves the same purpose as the curvature of an airplane wing. I guess it should be obvious, but a boomerang is only designed to come back if it misses the kangaroo. Another chapter discusses how mining scientists look for trace elements of minerals, such as selenium, in plants near mining deposits. A subsequent chapter discusses how icebergs can be and have been tugged to dryer climates. One long chapter about sound waves is only worth a tidbit or two about brass instruments always being flat in winter, along with the fact that 'the bends' has been resolved in divers by using helium instead of nitrogen in their oxygen mix. What would have seemed to be another, especially tedious chapter turned out quite well. It discusses the nature of inertia, and how all of gravity might just be explained by states of inertia. That is a running hypothesis, since the nature of gravity still remains a profound mystery to this day. The final chapter discusses what seem to be some pointless questions about why we can't see though a wall or a human body, although it does contain some fascinating experiments which show how the first part of a journey always seems to take longer than the second part. Generally speaking, a popular science book such as this is only valuable if it 1) teaches 2) reaches surprising conclusions or 3) inspires unexpected connections. This book tries very hard to be 3. It did inspire a few unexpected connections in me, but generally speaking, Magnus Pyke is trying too hard. Most of the joke consists in the superfluous connection between the tedious explanation of a simple theory, followed by some ridiculous, impractical application. The story of his cousin who convinced an admiral in Southest Asia that carrier ships should be made out of a kind of wood pulped ice (pycrete) springs to mind. As does his chapter connecting the scent you detect after rain to an application collecting petroleum in rain. Or the throw-away line that "pollution may be good." Hadn't the early signs of global warming reached him yet? Most of the half-assed cartoons don't use anything more than his more bizarre transition sentences as punchlines. Most importantly of all, Pyke wrote a book years before which attempted to analyze the nature of science. That interested me, until I see how callously Pyke praises gunpowder and atom bombs, without even mentioning that Nobel himself regretted the applications of dynamite. If you really want to see where Pyke's thinking might lead, read about Ice 9 in "Cat's Cradle" instead.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-24 00:00:00 Matt Blanchard كتاب مميز يشرح احدث النظريات عن نشأة الكون ويناقش مدى امكانية اثباته او تفنيده .ايضا يفسر كيف تتداخل الميتفيزيقيا في الفيزياء ومالنتائج المترتب عن ذلك ممتع وشيق