The Wonders of Physics

The following sections are included:

• Preface

• Contents

From the first part of the book the reader will learn why rivers are winding and how they wash their banks out, why the sky is blue and the white horses are white. We are going to tell you about properties of the ocean, about winds and the role of the Earth's rotation…

The following sections are included:

• Tea-leaves in a glass

• How river-beds change

• How meanders are formed

Let sceptical reader disbelieve the epigraph and search geographical atlases. Jokes apart, he will discover that 336 rivers fall into the lake of Baikal and only one, the mighty Angara, has it for the source. It turns out that Baikal is not the exception. No matter how many rivers fall into a lake only one comes out of it as a rule…

The following sections are included:

• Sound in water

• Light in water

• Water waveguides

• Applications?

Artists are endowed with sharp professional vision. This makes world in realistic landscapes outstandingly bright and colorful and features some natural events. Even best painters do not need to understand the reasons of the portrayed processes which often may be hidden deeply. However with the help of landscapes of a good painter one can study the ambient nature even better than in physical world. Suspending the moment in the picture the author intuitively focuses on the principals and omits inessential and passing details…

Reflections of various light sources from the surface of water often look like long shimmering lanes leading from the source to our eye. Just remember the setting sun reflected by sea or street lights along a night river quay. Glittering of the moon adorns the sea or lake with a wide stripe of light…

The following sections are included:

• Inertia forces in the rotating reference frame

• Interesting consequences

It was already long ago that people identified the Moon as the reason of tides. The Moon attracts the water of the world ocean and that forms in the ocean a water "hump". The hump keeps its place on the moon side as the Earth rotates about the axis. When the high water advances to a coast the tide rises and when it retreats the ebb starts. The theory looks rather natural but it leads to a contradiction. This would mean that tides must be a daily event but instead of that they happen every twelve hours…

We've got so accustomed to our circumstances that don't even notice many wonders and think about actual causes behind them. Yet at closer sight one discovers a great many grounds for contemplation…

When an object moves through a medium, there always appear resistance forces trying to slow the object down. It will be the force of dry friction when a body slides mechanically along a rigid surface; in a liquid or in a gas that will be respectively the liquid friction (viscosity) and the aerodynamic resistance, and so on…

It's not a novel idea that one can make simple wine-glasses sing. However, it turns out that there is a very peculiar way to do so. How peculiar? Well, you judge for yourself…

The following sections are included:

• Soap-bubbles

• On different kinds of droplets.

The series of pictures, shown on the third page of the cover, haven't been taken neither on Solaris, nor from a spaceship diving in the recondite abyss of Jupiter' atmosphere, nor from the window of a bathyscaphe having dared to approach an erupting underwater volcano. Not even close. They are just photographs of working Lava-lamp, a gadget anyone could without much trouble find, for example, in a "Hands-on" toy shop or sometimes in a big department store. And yet, it turns out that this seemingly simple device conceals plenty of beautiful and subtle physical phenomena…

There are thick Eastern manuscripts as well as long detailed chapters in special books devoted entirely to the tea drinking ritual. Yet when taking another, unconventional, peek at the process, one surely finds in galore interesting and edifying physical phenomena, which are not described even in the most reverent culinary "oracles"…

The day when the Neanderthal man tamed the fire opens era humana. Once and forever the MANKIND broke off with the ape ancestors. Fire opened the way to smelting metals, manufacturing cars, flying to the outer space but above all… it allowed to forget the taste of raw meat. A wellbrowned beefsteak may symbolize civilization side by side with the model of atom…

The following section are included:

• About one invention of Alexander Bell

Recently, we have grown so accustomed to the television, radio, cellular phones and Internet, that we are not any more a tiny bit surprised by the fact that we can so easily receive the needed information from pretty much any corner of the world. Yet it was not always like that (actually not even close) and not a very long time ago…

Long times ago, the Ancient Greeks had noticed that tightly drawn string began sometimes to sound melodically in the wind, like if it was singing. Perhaps, back then people already knew the Aeolian harp, named so after Aeolus, the God of Winds in the Greek mythology. It is made up of a frame (or an open box) with several strings stretched across; it is put, then, in a place where the wind could pass through it. Even a single string in such an instrument can generate quite a spectrum of different tones. Something of the same nature occurs, although with far more limited tune variety, when the wind swings the cables of telegraph lines…

The following sections are included:

• The dense packing of balls

• The long-range and short-range orders

Sections of roads and railroad tracks passing through hollows are often covered with snow even if there have been no snowfalls recently. Why does this happen? Certainly, the answer is at the surface: the snow has been brought by wind. However it took a good deal of investigation to understand in detail the mechanism of the process…

Not so long ago the authors of these lines had to return from Venice to Naples by express train. The train ran fast (its velocity was about 150 km/h) and landscapes that looked like paintings by Renaissance masters flitted by outside the window. In perfect accord with their canvases, the country was hilly, and we sometimes flew over a bridge or dove into a tunnel…

Finally the time has come to tell you about strange laws ruling in the world of microparticles. You will learn how these laws reveal themselves through "superphenomena" which take place at very low and not so low temperatures. We shall try to make the things as easy as possible. Still this will not be a small talk for any real comprehension would appeal to mathematical language of modern physics. But we hope that you'll appreciate the marvels of this unbelievable, surprising and promising world.

The following sections are included:

• Momentum and coordinate

• The probability waves

• The zero-point oscillations

Helium, despite his just second position in the periodic table of elements, has since its discovery been a source of great many hassles for physicists due to its quite unorthodox properties. Yet these troubles and headaches were overwhelmingly outshone by the beauty and uniqueness of physical phenomena occurring in the liquid helium as well as by the opportunities it offers to researchers and engineers in production of extremely low temperatures. Among the peculiarities of this quantum liquid, besides superfluidity, there stands also its specific, different from other liquids, mechanism of charge transfer. And here our story starts…

The following sections are included:

• Starting from the end

• From surprise to the understanding.

• Chasing high critical parameters.

• Quasi-two-dimensional superconductivity between antiferromagnetic and metallic states

The following sections are included:

• The quantization of magnetic flux

• Josephson effect

• The quantum magnetometer

The following sections are included:

• The Meißner effect in detail

• The Abrikosov vortices

• What is pinning?

The following section are included:

• Afterword