Everyday life physic
This book of problems with solutions deals with the physics of everyday's life. By this one must understand the macroscopic physics of objects such as toys, gadgets, simple mechanical devices, etc, which we find around us at home. The level of needed school instruction is that of the fourth year of college in America, or two to three years after the high school diploma in Europe. The style oscillates between scientific games such as those examined in journals of the Scientific American type and some of the tripos' exams at Cambridge in the late 19th century or the competition exams to to admitted to ``Grandes Ecoles (mostly engineering schools) in France, and the examination called ``agrégation which one had to go through for teaching physics in lycées in the French academic system. Solutions are often of the type presented in the American Journal of Physics. But the difficulty of the proposed problems belongs to a different class. The statement of the thirty proposed problems is purely descriptive and in words, one purpose of the exercise in fact being to think about the appropriate notation to be introduced, about the type of preliminary questions that one should ask oneself before attacking the real problem, what are the common sense approximations to be envisaged and, finally, wherever possible, to set the problem in an appropriate mathematical form, and deduce some numerical estimates where required. So this is mostly about the modeling of a physical problem of mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism or optics. We all know that this is the most difficult part of the story since the student rarely has to deal with this part. Usually we suggest a notation, give him a clue about approximations, and conceive the statement of a problem in the form of a logical succession of questions that should lead the average student to a large part of the solution. Here nothing of this sort is done. The author really proposes a general method, or guidelines, to attack such problems. His advices concern essentially the analysis of the given text, always rapidly estimate some numerical values, pay attention to physical units, discuss the accuracy and justify the approximations, select a thermodynamical approach (equation of balance) wherever feasible, clearly distinguish between heat and temperature, and in mechanics always deal first with the kinematics and then decide on whether a force approach or an energy one is most efficient. The variety of proposed problems is large: yoyo, motion of a car with a trailer, observation of halos, liquid mirrors, how to cook an egg, vibrating strings, holding a ruler on top of a finger (problem of bifurcation akin to that of a unicycle), caustics and optical catastrophe, spin reversal of the rattleback (``celtic stone), tops, Earnshaw's theorem, foams, hydraulic jumps, water-propelled rockets, Fermat's principle, etc. The extended solutions are presented with talent in a pleasant language. Each lengthy critically exposed solution is accompanied by a short bibliography. The author has already published a book in the same style [Petits problèmes de physique, Part I, Springer (1998)] to which he often refers for complements. We may be somewhat skeptical about the pedagogical virtues of such a book. The whole enterprise may be thought of as a somewhat gratuitous intellectual game. The proper required turn of mind is that cultivated in some elite groups through an everyday training, so much is it true that this way of thinking can be acquired by a repetition of many exercises of the same type. With training, this becomes an Art so that very few self-educated people would be able to solve the proposed problems. With time, we come to believe that this is the result of intuition whereas, in fact, it is a true profession. This may be what is misleading in the purpose of the book because many of those who have gone through such a training and acquired thus a mental accuteness, do not become scientists. They know how to think and analyse; they do not know how to invent! But in reading that book, there remains the great pleasure felt at reading the proposed detailed analysis and solutions which occupy some 250 pages out of 310. In other words, the book favorably compares with M. Gardners' mathematical games of Scientific American. It may be more for this play-like tendency than for its pedagogical virtues that it brings fun to trained professional scientists. The latter will enjoy the solutions and may get some interesting suggestions for problems in their class teaching experience. This book is unhesitatingly recommended to all physicists, professionals and enligthened amateurs. It is also recommended for an English translation.
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