Life′s Devices – The Physical World of Animals & Plants: The Physical World of Animals and Plants - Hardcover

Vogel, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691085048 ISBN 13: 9780691085043

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1992

Synopsis

This entertaining and informative book describes how living things bump up against non-biological reality. "My immodest aim," says the author, "is to change how you view your immediate surroundings." He asks us to wonder about the design of plants and animals around us: why a fish swims more rapidly than a duck can paddle, why healthy trees more commonly uproot than break, how a shark manages with such a flimsy skeleton, or how a mouse can easily survive a fall onto any surface from any height.

The book will not only fascinate the general reader but will also serve as an introductory survey of biomechanics. On one hand, organisms cannot alter the earth's gravity, the properties of water, the compressibility of air, or the behavior of diffusing molecules. On the other, such physical factors form both constraints with which the evolutionary process must contend and opportunities upon which it might capitalize. Life's Devices includes examples from every major group of animals and plants, with references to recent work, with illustrative problems, and with suggestions of experiments that need only common household materials.

About this title

Review:

"A brilliant and eccentric book that looks at living things from an engineering point of view, assuming astonishingly little previous knowledge of science on the reader's part."--Nature

From the Author:

Something between a textbook and a popular account.
The book won the Irving and Jean Stone Prize for Science Writing for Public Understanding. And the author has written for Scientific American, Natural History, and Discover. Still, the book has some equations--if equations have your number, try my "Cats' Paws and Catapults" (Norton, 1998). In any case, this latter has a better story line.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0691085048
• ISBN 13: 9780691085043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384