Etienne Guyon Book order

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.

"Granular materials are composed of macroscopic particles, not molecules, and yet they can assemble in disordered configurations, such is present in glass, and they exhibit both fluid-like and solid-like behaviors. This book gives a broad introduction to granular materials, a fast-developing field that impacts most science and engineering disciplines, describing the different types and origins of grains, natural and fabricated, and explaining the physical properties of a "pile" of grains. All the physical concepts that have been investigated during the last thirty years are described and illustrated in simple terms"-- Provided by publisher