Skip to main content

Physics for Gearheads - Randy Beikmann ***

One of this site's favourite physics books is Physics for Future Presidents, so having a 'Physics for...' format is certainly no negative - and I count myself as a paid-up petrolhead, which I assume is similar to the term 'gearhead' which I've never encountered before (and neither has my spellchecker).

 In fact that American term hides a much bigger problem that is encountered as early as page 3. No one in Europe gets taught physics in feet and pounds and degrees Fahrenheit these days - so it is immediately baffling that we get force measured in pounds as in 'This comes from the road surface pushing up on the tire contact patches with a total force of 1,500 lb.' The other concern about the first few pages is that we've launched into what the author admits is a discussion of classical physics, using a term like 'force' that is frequently misused in ordinary English without ever saying what a force is. It's just assumed that we know. Once we get into equations that lack of proper scientific units gets even more hairy. I just can't look at an equation working out force in a cylinder from pressure times an area as (500 pounds/inch2) x (12.566 inch2) without feeling I'm reading something from Victorian times.

 Of course, in the UK we are mixed up when it comes to units. We buy our petrol in litres and measure temperatures in Celsius but we still measure car speeds in miles per hour and distances in miles - but the rest of Europe doesn't, and, as I stressed, all our school teaching about physics will have been using MKS metric units. Admittedly from chapter 2 onwards, the book does at least mention what the MKS units are, but it still tends to do its the examples using the old Imperial units (known here as 'SFS' units and as 'SAE' units - not sure what the difference is) - and some of these, like 'slug' as the unit of mass, I've never even heard of.

 All this is a bit of shame, as there's lots of good material in the book. It read too much like a textbook (too reminiscent of the sort of thing I had to plough through at school for my liking), but is cleanly and attractively laid out and gets a lot of material in, usually giving a thorough and well-paced run through. Reading it was work rather than pleasure, but it was useful work if you want to have the tools to work out all the kinds of mechanical forces and energies and such involved in making a car go. As such, I'm not sure it's a fun read for someone who likes tinkering with cars, but it would be a great primer for would-be American auto engineers, and as such I will glowingly recommend it. (The pricing reflects this too - it's priced at over £44 in the UK.)

So this is a book that really only works for a US market and that is much more textbook for budding engineers than popular science for petrolheads. I would love to see a true popular science equivalent - one that explains the science behind the way cars work without all the tedious workings out - but this isn't it.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Martin O'Brien
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more