Two weeks ago I received a free book through the mail. Written by Mark Frary and published by Rodale Books, the book bore the promising title Better Living Through Science: The Basic Scientific Principles You Need To Solve Every Household Conundrum. I'd forgotten about the book until yesterday when Kate, a communications assistant at Rodale, sent me an e-mail saying she'd love to talk to me about my plans to cover it.
Physics Today doesn't routinely review books like Frary's. The magazine's books editor prefers to devote his limited pages to titles aimed at the physics community—with good reason. For some of those books, Physics Today is the only publication that provides a review.
But my hunch is that you, the readers of my blog, might want to know more about a book that purports to help you in your everyday lives.
The 142-page book contains an introduction, plus 34 illustrated chapters with titles like How to combat garlic breath, How to win at pool, and How to sail a yacht. Each chapter succinctly describes the science behind the problem and the solution. "This book," writes the author in the introduction, "explains things in an easy-to-understand manner that can be enjoyed by anyone, no matter what grades you got back in high school."
If you're a scientist like me, you'll probably find the book offers a mix of things you already know or could easily deduce and things you don't know. The chapters on throwing balls, stopping cars, and other applications of Newtonian mechanics didn't teach me anything new, but I did learn how to remove a red wine stain from clothing (apply a mixture of liquid soap and hydrogen peroxide).
My biggest beef with the book is that it doesn't live up to its subtitle. I didn't expect such a short book to discuss "every household conundrum." But, having outlined 34 quotidian problems, the author could have gone on to explain how to approach solving all the others.
According to a much-quoted Australian aboriginal proverb, "The more you know, the less you need." Frary's solutions, most of which don't require special tools, exemplify that piece of folk wisdom. But his omission of a general discussion of the scientific method brings to mind an addendum to the proverb: "The more you understand, the less you need to know."
