Physics and life. The laws of nature: from the kitchen to space. Helene Cherki

The physicist explains what scientific ideas are hidden behind everyday phenomena and how simple things like an explosion of popcorn and magnets in the refrigerator are connected with such great ideas as climate changes and innovative medical diagnostics.

If you pour some milk into a cup of tea and quickly stir with a spoon, then you will first see something like a small whirlpool, a spiral of two liquids that carry each other in a swirl and only barely contacting each other.

The same picture can be seen in other places and on a different scale - and its cause will be the same. If you look at the Earth from the cosmos, then you can often observe very similar “whirlpools” in the clouds - in those places where the masses of warm and cold air are circling each other, instead of simply mixing with each other.

In Britain, such air Whirlwinds regularly move through the Atlantic Ocean, from west to east, and are the reason for the variability of the British weather, which enjoys bad fame. These air whirlpools are formed on the border between the cold polar air, which moves from the north, and warm tropical air from the south.

However, the similarity of the paintings that we observe in both cases is not a simple accident. It indicates a certain general, more fundamental basis. Under their external similarities, a certain systematic basis is hidden for all such phenomena - the basis, open, investigated and tested during strict scientific experiments conducted by more than one generation of scientists.

This discovery process is science: continuous clarification and verification of our new understanding of certain phenomena of the world around them, along with new research that reveal new facts that require understanding.

The beauty of physical laws lies precisely in their versatility: they act both in the kitchen and in the most remote corners of the Universe.

For whom this book
This book will be useful to everyone who is interested in how the Universe works and what brings it into action