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Physics

The Electromagnetic Force of Fridge Magnets

An illustrated guide to the universal laws in your kitchen.

Dant_HERO

Science is not just something we do at school or professionals undertake in labs. It is at the heart of how everything works. With the development of applied scientific principles, science enables us to not only understand how things work but how to make use of that understanding in the technology that supports our everyday lives. In this excerpt from their new book, How it All Works, Adam Dant and Brian Clegg take us inside a modern kitchen. Each illustration is accompanied by a short description of the scientific law (marked with an “L”) or phenomena (marked with a “P”) behind the activity or object featured. They show us that in everything we do, in everything we experience, we are witnessing and taking part in scientific phenomena, guided and linked by scientific laws.

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Adam Dant is a contemporary British artist known for his visual narratives realized through elaborate and intricate pen-and-ink drawings. Dant has work in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Lyons, The New Art Gallery Walsall, the Deutsche Bank and UBS collections, and in many leading private collections.

Brian Clegg is an English science writer. He is the author of popular science books on topics including light, infinity, quantum entanglement and surviving the impact of climate change, and biographies of Roger Bacon and Eadweard Muybridge.

Reprinted with permission from Ivy Press, an imprint of The Quarto Group. Copyright © 2021 Brian Clegg and Adam Dant.

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