Have You Ever Wondered...

Humans are innately curious.

From a young age, we start to ask questions about the world around us. We want to understand why things are they way they are. But even the most simplistic-sounding questions – “Why is the sky blue?” or “Why do things fall down?” – turn out to have surprisingly complex answers. (In brief, light scattering by the atmosphere and gravity are the answers to those questions, though of course the technical answers are much more in-depth).

If simple questions have such relatively complex answers, then the more sophisticated questions we ask as we get older must also have more complicated answers. For those more difficult problems, we must often turn to experts. Scientific American’s “Ask the Experts” column has been doing just that for years. Across all fields of science, Scientific American has asked top scientists, professors and researchers to answer questions from the basic to the esoteric. Many questions came from readers; others came from our editors. Some questions relate to recent events, while others have to do with long-standing theories; some affect our daily lives, while others are for the pure pursuit of knowledge.

A popular department that ran for decades, the hundreds of entries in our archives run the gamut across subjects from astronomy to the environment to technology. Now, we’ve combed through those archives and have compiled some of the most interesting questions (and answers) into a series of eBooks. Organized by subject, each eBook within the series provides short, easily digestible answers to questions on that particular branch of the sciences.

The first eBook in our series – Physics and Math – explains a wide range of natural phenomena and mathematical concepts. Have you ever wondered what exactly antimatter is? Two researchers who wrote a book about particle physics and a PhD student at Harvard explain it in Section 5, “Stranger Things.” Or, have you ever heard the rumor that glass is actually a supercooled liquid, and that that’s why old windows are thicker at the bottom than on the top? In Section 3, “Everyday Physics,” a chemistry professor from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an antique glass researcher at the Corning Museum of Glass shatter this myth while explaining why glass is in fact a strange material.

How about game theory, quantum mechanics and the origin of pi? Mathematicians and professors from universities across the country tackle these topics, drawing on their extensive expertise to give answers that are at once accurate and comprehensible by those who haven’t studied physics or math since high school.

You might also come across some questions that you wouldn’t have even known to ask—such as, “Are mathematicians finally satisfied with Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem?” They are, as you’ll read in Section 2, “Doing the Math.” But the answer also reveals why it took so long to prove this theorem.

Looking for answers to questions on Biology? The Environment? Chemistry? Or Everyday Science? Be sure to check out our other eBooks in this series. You’ll discover things like what makes a knuckleball flutter, whether we really only use 10% of our brains, why snowflakes are symmetrical and much more.


–Geoffrey Giller
Book Editor