How to Dunk a Doughnut: The science of everyday life by Len Fisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 拢12.99, ISBN 0297607561 Reviewed by Wendy Grossman
YOU have to be very dedicated to science to dunk and eat 140 biscuits with a stainless steel tube thrust up your nose, chewing each for a specified count, while a colleague presses buttons to record and analyse the results. This is how people win IgNobel prizes (for scientific achievements that 鈥渃annot, or should not, be reproduced鈥�), and indeed physicist Len Fisher is an IGlaureate. In How to Dunk a Doughnut he drops a hint that he was considered for a second prize (confirmed).
Fisher, like the Igs, has a serious point, however: he believes that people are hungry to understand good science, and that everyday things are the way to help them connect to it. The study for which Fisher won his Ig had more to it than simply finding a way to dunk a biscuit so it wouldn鈥檛 collapse under its own weight. Unlocking the secrets of capillary action and stress cracks opens the way to studying not just baked goods, but how trees grow and how solid materials fracture.
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What is fascinating about Fisher鈥檚 book is the sheer number of mysteries inherent in daily life. Working out the best strategy for supermarket shopping or throwing a boomerang may not sound like the stuff of 鈥淩eal Science鈥�, but each problem leads to a more complex one. Except, it has to be said, for supermarket mathematics 鈥� though this chapter does give you the quick tip that the higher the proportion of prices ending in 99p on your cash register receipt, the more relatively expensive your supermarket is likely to be. Even something as deceptively simple as catching a ball is immensely complex, if you try to do it via mathematical calculations, anyway.
Spending many hours on such ordinary problems may seem odd. But the results are certainly entertaining. Did you know you can restore the mint flavour of gum by taking a sip from a sweet drink? Try it.