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    Unavailable
    Why Things Break: Understanding the World By the Way It Comes Apart
    Unavailable
    Why Things Break: Understanding the World By the Way It Comes Apart
    Unavailable
    Why Things Break: Understanding the World By the Way It Comes Apart
    Ebook244 pages3 hours

    Why Things Break: Understanding the World By the Way It Comes Apart

    By Mark Eberhart

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Did you know—

    • It took more than an iceberg to sink the Titanic.
    • The Challenger disaster was predicted.
    • Unbreakable glass dinnerware had its origin in railroad lanterns.
    • A football team cannot lose momentum.
    • Mercury thermometers are prohibited on airplanes for a crucial reason.
    • Kryptonite bicycle locks are easily broken.

    “Things fall apart” is more than a poetic insight—it is a fundamental property of the physical world. Why Things Break explores the fascinating question of what holds things together (for a while), what breaks them apart, and why the answers have a direct bearing on our everyday lives.

    When Mark Eberhart was growing up in the 1960s, he learned that splitting an atom leads to a terrible explosion—which prompted him to worry that when he cut into a stick of butter, he would inadvertently unleash a nuclear cataclysm. Years later, as a chemistry professor, he remembered this childhood fear when he began to ponder the fact that we know more about how to split an atom than we do about how a pane of glass breaks.

    In Why Things Break, Eberhart leads us on a remarkable and entertaining exploration of all the cracks, clefts, fissures, and faults examined in the field of materials science and the many astonishing discoveries that have been made about everything from the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger to the crashing of your hard drive. Understanding why things break is crucial to modern life on every level, from personal safety to macroeconomics, but as Eberhart reveals here, it is also an area of cutting-edge science that is as provocative as it is illuminating.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateDec 18, 2007
    ISBN9780307422699
    Unavailable
    Why Things Break: Understanding the World By the Way It Comes Apart

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    Reviews for Why Things Break

    3.5/5

    26 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 4/5
      I enjoyed most of this book. The author intersperses his career pathway with some history of materials science and design. The last three chapters were the densest and least-readable for me. A few diagrams or graphs would have helped hugely, but the book has no illustrations.
    • 3/5
      Rather eclectic book that interweaves the career trajectory of the author with a lot of technical information about the forces that hold materials together and what goes wrong when things break.