Cats’ Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People
Cats’ Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People Books
Product Description
Which is more well-organized, a 747 or a bird in flight? Which is stronger, a vine or a rope? Which is better calculated, a lobster claw or a pair of pliers? Who builds better, nature or us? Human technology has taken a mere 10,000 years or so to develop; nature’s selected designs–the look and function of animals and plants–are billions of years ancient. Although the two technologies share the same corporal environment–the same building materials, gases, and minerals; the same temperature range; and the same force of gravity–they yield vastly different consequences. Human designers like aptly angles, but nature chooses to be round, curved, and without aptly angles. Humans find metals the most marvelous of materials, but no structure in nature is metallic. We use rotating wheels in diverse ways, but nature’s only right wheels come in bacteria. We prefer to make surface ships, even as nature swims. Our hinges turn because their parts slide, even as natural hinges turn because their structure bends, like a rabbit’s ears. Man-made machines have hot combustion engines; nature does its work at local temperatures. Questions arise from these differences. Does nature have some essential superiority? Why have the two technologies taken such separate courses? Cats’ Paws and Catapults is about the way living things work–how they walk, run, jump, glide, and grow. In small, this book introduces the reader to the field of biomechanics and clarifies how corporal law and historical accident became our world’s supreme architects.Amazon.com Review
“Life is what biology’s all about. Technology is something else altogether. Or so I believed before I got into a kind of biology that’s about technology as well as life,” starts biomechanics expert Steven Vogel in the preface to Cats’ Paws and Catapults. Vogel examines the “mechanical worlds of nature and people” in such chapters as “The Stiff and the Soft” and “The Matter of Magnitude.” Lots of line-drawing illustrations help readers know the examples used to resolution questions of animal and machine efficiency, design and repair. Vogel clearly likes the puzzles of biology–why, for instance, do daffodil stems bend at only one precise spot? This book is filled with intriguing answers to such hidden questions, and curious readers will keenly dive into Vogel’s investigations of whether nature or human design is superior and why the two technologies have diverged so much. –Therese Littleton
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