The flying circus of physics

Someone I met at the Isaac Physics teacher symposium last year recommended this book. I bought it, and it’s a lot of fun. It contains lots of little questions that are fun to think about. There are answers at the back, but the joy of the book is ignoring the answers altogether and trying to figure out the answers by yourselves. I’m going to share some fun questions from this book in the next few blog posts (under a new category).

To get us started, here’s the first little puzzle.

Why does a piece of chalk squeak if you hold it wrong while pushing it against a blackboard? Why does the angle the chalk makes to the board matter? What determines the pitch of the squeak you hear?

Comment on this blog post with your thoughts!