Hidden Wonders

Preface ................................................................................... vi
I. BUILDERS ...........................................................1
The Elegance of Small and Slender Things................................2
Azay-le-Rideau or Roofs of Beauty........................................... 10
The Eiffel Tower......................................................................... 18
Inner Balance..............................................................................26
Surface Tension ..........................................................................34
II. CREATING SHAPES.............................43
And We Think of Bubbles as Fragile!.......................................44
The Tragedy of Foam .................................................................52
Necklaces and Catenaries..........................................................60
Elegant Stone Arches.................................................................68
Shells and Mille-Feuilles ........................................................ 76
III. BUILDING WITH THREAD ........85
An Eight-Legged Builder..........................................................86
Wet Hair.....................................................................................94
Birds as Architects ...................................................................104
An Impressive Bridge of Grasses..............................................114
Folders and Tailors: Masters of Volume.................................. 122
Weaving and Braiding ............................................................. 132
Folding and Crumpling Paper Balls........................................ 142
IV. FROM SAND TO GLASS............... 153
Seeing a World in a Grain of Sand.......................................... 154
The Secret of Sandcastles......................................................... 162
Earthen Architecture............................................................... 172
Liquid Stone: Concrete ............................................................ 180
The Saga of Fusing Granular Matter....................................... 188
States of Glass .......................................................................... 196
V. MATTER IN MOTION......................... 205
Beams Bend but Do Not Break...............................................206
Vaulting into the Air................................................................ 216
The Choreography of Pine Cones............................................. 224
Flying Seeds............................................................................. 232
Quaking Bows.......................................................................... 242
Uppity Grains of Sand ............................................................. 252
VI. FRACTURES .............................................261
Prehistoric Gems ..................................................................... 262
Pointed Tears ........................................................................... 270
The Geometry of Lettuce ....................................................... 278
Eloquent Craquelures ..............................................................286
Walking on Eggs ....................................................................294
Glass Teardrops .......................................................................302
Glossary .................................................................................... 310
Reading List............................................................................. 312
Acknowledgments.................................................................... 313
The hidden elegance in everyday objects and physical mechanisms, from crumpled paper to sandcastles.

Hidden Wonders focuses on the objects that populate our everyday life--crumpled paper, woven fabric, a sand pile--but looks at them with a physicist's eye, revealing a hidden elegance in mundane physical mechanisms. In six chapters--Builders, Creating Shapes, Building with Threads, From Sand to Glass, Matter in Motion, and Fractures--the authors present brief stories, set in locales ranging from the Eiffel Tower to a sandcastle, that illustrate the little wonders hidden in the ordinary. A simple experiment that readers can perform at home concludes each story. More than 200 illustrations bring the stories to life.