Making a little science go a long way

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, scientific laws, scientific phenomena, compendia

"Your task, should you accept it, is to write a 15-to-30-word summary of a law or phenomenon of science. Then do it 600 times." In How It All Works: All Scientific Laws and Phenomena Illustrated and Demonstrated, written by Brian Clegg and illustrated by Adam Dant, the actual number of summaries is 598. With repetitions (5 each for the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Strong Interaction, but usually no more than 2), the number of actual items summarized is 525.

Ignoring repetitions, the number of items tagged "L" for Law is 100. The rest (498) are tagged "P" for Phenomenon. Since there are more than 200 scientific laws named for people, and numerous others without eponyms, such as the geological Law of Superposition or the Law of Reflection in optics, a lot has been left out. However, as comprehensive as my scientific education is, there were a few things I learned, so nearly anyone will find new things to learn…or, to begin to learn, because a 2- to 3-sentence blurb provides only a starting point.

I'm not sure about the validity of one of these, Dermott's Law. The summary is seen in the image.

The "law" is an empirical relationship that is approximately true, given suitable values of the minimum period and the derived constant, for the major moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. There is a particular minimum period and constant for each planet's system of satellites.  In a (very brief) Wikipedia Article, this conclusion is stated: 

"Such power-laws may be a consequence of collapsing-cloud models of planetary and satellite systems possessing various symmetries [such as] the Titius-Bode law. They may also reflect the effect of resonance-driven commensurabilities in the various systems."

I prefer to call it the Dermott Trend. In itself, it is a clue that the phenomena of natural satellite formation have certain regularities. A real law or set of laws may one day describe these regularities.

The image above shows how the summaries are presented. In each 10-page chapter we first see a two-page illustration with lots happening. Then we find 46 items cropped from the illustration accompanied by text summarizing the law or phenomenon. The 13 chapters begin with the Kitchen and proceed in expanding steps to the largest realms, The Solar System (12) and The Entire Universe! (13). The Laws are unevenly scattered, with at least one in each chapter, and 22 in the middle chapter, The Street (7). Between 24 and 45 phenomena are used to round out each chapter.

I must point out an error in one summary. For Brewster's Law we read, "The polarization of a reflected ray of light is dependent on the angle at which it enters a transparent medium. The sun's rays are polarized by the mirror." Brewster's Law applies to transparent media, as the first sentence states. The light reflected from the first (glass) surface of an ordinary mirror will be partially polarized, or wholly polarized if the angle of reflection is Brewster's Angle, a function of the refractive index of the glass. But light reflected from the metallic coating on the back of the mirror is not polarized. Furthermore, in that part of the illustration, the beam of "sunlight" being reflected is coming from the wrong direction: the sun is below the horizon behind the mirror, on the other side of the picture, throwing crepuscular rays across clouds (the Crepuscular Rays are a phenomenon summarized a few blurbs later).

This is a fun book. I'll give the author a pass for not actually including "all laws and phenomena", which would require some gigantic, uncountable number of blurbs.