Why Does a Ball Bounce?: 101 Questions You Never Thought of Asking - Hardcover

Adam Hart-Davis is a scientist, photographer, writer and broadcaster.

This book is about my love for photography and science.

I have enjoyed photography since I was given a Brownie Cresta at the age of about 10, and I remember taking a picture of our cat asleep on the bird table. When I was 18 I spent a year doing Voluntary Service Overseas in India, and took hundreds of photographs in that vast and fascinating country. I started using slides then, on my brother's advice, in order to be able to give talks about my travels. In the late 1970s I began to take my photography more seriously, acquiring a 35 mm camera with interchangeable lenses, and 10 years later I began also to use medium-format equipment.

Meanwhile, I have spent my whole working life trying to explain science ideas in words and pictures. My first job was editing science books; I went on to be a researcher and then producer in the science department at a local television network. I now have no job, but I write articles and books, present radio and television programs, take photographs, and all these activities are aimed at illustrating and explaining ideas in science and technology.

Whether the question is "How does a balloon burst?" or "Why do icicles have bubbles up the middle?", I want to tease out the answer. Photographs may pose the question, or they may help to provide a solution, but for me at least they are part of the beauty of science. In this book you will find some truly scientific pictures, some pictures of mundane things that I find scientifically interesting, and some pictures that cannot be called scientific at all, but are included because they give me excuses to tell stories.

Writing this book was a bit scary, because in many of the topics I am way out of my depth and could make terrible mistakes, which is why I enlisted the help of a gang of friends and experts to check most of the text. In spite of their help I expect I have managed to include some errors.

The logical way to write a book like this would be to compile a list of interesting questions, and then set about taking photographs to answer them. I did it the other way round. I looked for good photographs, wrote what I hope are interesting things about them, and then tried to think of sensible questions.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading it and looking at the pictures as much as I enjoyed writing it and taking them.

Adam Hart-Davis