Have you ever played a game like this before? You are given a pendulum and a glass bottle. You should swing the pendulum in a way that it will not touch the bottle in the first swing, but will knock down the bottle when it swings back! But actually you can hardly do this without knocking out the bottle on the first swing, unless you turn and rotate the ball of the pendulum before swing it!
And there are many more interesting questions! Like what will happen when two trains at high speeds of adjacent railways meet each other? Why do birds fly in a “V” shape? Why corpses will float on water?
These are all related to our daily life. If two trains at high speeds of adjacent railways do not slow down when they meet, the windows of the trains, may be broken! Because a high pressure is built in front of the train while a low pressure is produced behind the train. As two trains meet, the low-pressure area between the two trains will pull the windows out, and if the trains do not reduce their speed, the force will be so big that they break the window!
As birds fly, their wings will cause a rising air behind them, as a result, if they fly in a “V” shape, the birds behind can fly with less effort as the rising air helps them. And, as a person dies, the body decays, producing some gases that make the corpse float.
The question I found most interesting is about distinguishing uncooked and cooked egg. If you do not know whether an egg is cooked or not, just rotate it, use the finger to stop it and then remove the finger immediately. Cooked egg will stop rotating while uncooked egg will go on rotating! That is because even if you stop the egg by a finger, you are just stopping the eggshell. The liquid inside the egg is still rotating, and so the egg will continue rotating as you remove the finger.
There are also some questions that I know, for example, the time of contact of soft balls are longer than that of hard balls and little elastic balls in size of a ping-pong ball can kill, etc.
The title and cover of this book first attracted me. The word “circus” seems to be interesting, and the cover shows a man trying to fly on a strange looking “aeroplane”.
This book contains about 210 questions and answers in total. Some are shorter and while some occupies almost four pages! I like this book, as the questions are related to my surroundings and interesting. There is always a law beside the question, telling you what laws or physical phenomenon is the question talking about. The explanations are also easy to understand, and therefore I think it is suitable for students to read. I am quite surprised that some very little things happened that I thought was natural before can be explained by physical means, and this book also corrects some of my misconceptions.
I cannot answer the question most of the time, but whenever I come across questions that I know, I would be excited. However, some questions, like what will become of the water level if a stone is dropped into a swimming pool, which I thought was simple before, turns out to be not as easy. For the above question, I thought that the water level will rise, but the correct answer is: the water level will drop instead!
When I flipped to the answer, it said that some famous physicists like George Gamow, Robert Oppenheimer and Felix Bloch also answered this question wrongly!
I think this book’s presentation is also very good, as the question- and-answer presentation allows the author to present his ideas in a more interactive way, allowing the readers to think, and also avoid very lengthy and difficult explanations. It said in the cover of the book that this collection of books was also translated to French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. However, some questions in the book are not answered, and the author asks the reader to find the answer themselves by searching information or doing experiments. I do not like this arrangement, as some of the experiments are difficult to perform. It is quite hard to find out the answer. Also the translation is not very good. Some sentences are weird.
On the whole, I find the book interesting, useful and interactive. The explanations are clear and easy to understand.
