Thread: The Flying Circus of Physics

Just a general invite to this STatU group:

The Flying Circus of Physics is a book by Jearl Walker. It is a collection of over 600 observational oddities, some of which can easily be explained, some are enormously difficult to explain. One edition of the book is subtitled "WITH ANSWERS", as the original edition did not make any attempt to explain the phenomana. Some of the "answers" merely say that nothing is known. It has 1632 references to scientific books and papers. My copy appears to date from 1977, but this webpage refers to a second edition, completely rewritten and redesigned: Flying Circus of Physics - The Book

The first four topics:

2.50 The leaning tower of books [and the Euler-Mascheroni constant]

5.15 (2ed) Hindenburg disaster

4.103 Smoke ring tricks

5.128 Seeing the colors of your mind

Might I also recommend the wonderful collection of anomalous observations in all areas of science available at Science Frontiers Digest of Scientific Anomalies and collected by William R. Corliss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia who died earlier this year. For anyone wanting to understand how this Universe works, these sources are a gold mine.

Thanks Ray! I've read some of his books--it was in one of his books that I first read about earth cookies.

That link for the colors of your mind and your tiny summary really make me ask questions. That is so interesting.

Thanks, JFalz1024, your invitation is in the mail!

A Land effect webpage

Three new topics:

3.18 (2ed) Long-distance sound

5.136 Moon-to-sun line

Feynman's Tips on Physics

That last one is obviously not from Jearl Walker's book, but it currently has tips on taking derivatives, the Feynman way

A new topic, a spin-off of some calculations I made trying to explain the gravitational shell theorem.
http://www.spacetimeandtheuniverse.c...s-gravity.html

However, I'm having trouble with TeX--I can't get it to compile new equations, just old ones???!