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TABLE TOP SCIENCE: Physics Experiments for Everyone by S. H. Fisher

TABLE TOP SCIENCE: Physics Experiments for Everyone

By

Pub Date: Jan. 7th, 1971
Publisher: Doubleday

For everyone, that is, who really wants another collection of experiments on the usual scattering of topics -- air, water, heat, machines, magnetism and electricity, and light -- with pretty soft blue pictures but no explicit diagrams or photographs, with simple directions culminating for each experiment in the question ""what happens?"" or ""what do you observe?"" -- but no background theory, no clarifying interpretation relating the experiment to any principle, or even any prodding questions that might lead the experimenter to his own interpretation or conclusions. What general discussion is included is too often self-evident, irrelevant, or simply unilluminating: on heat, we're told that ""when it is a cold day in winter, we say we 'feel cold'"" and that ""a scientist says that he is studying heat even when he is experimenting with a piece of ice"" because ""coldness is the same sort of thing as hotness, We say that a hot thing is at a higher temperature than a cold thing"" -- and that a thermometer is used to measure temperature -- but despite fifteen pages of experiments with heat, including some headed ""expansion and contraction,"" there is no mention of the motion of molecules or any clue as to why the expansion and contraction occur. Not for anyone we can think of.