Motorcycle Maintenance and the Art of Physics Appreciation

-- by Dwight E. Neuenschwander, Editor

How many people driving a car every day carry in their minds a mental image of the mechanics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism that make their machine possible?

Our society is saturated with technological applications of science. Yet most people you encounter in the laser-equipped grocery store checkout line, waiting in the clinic for their MRI, or sitting next to you on the airplane, seem amazingly uncurious about how any of this stuff works. How quickly the marvelous becomes commonplace and taken for granted!

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• Summer 2004