Now we come to a book in the Science for Everyone series which eluded me for years, only to be found with one of my dear friends. This book is Physical Paradoxes and Sophisms by V. N. Lange. Long before I had read about this book in the advertisements on the back pages of other books, but had never a chance to see it. Many of the problems discussed in this book are revealing and take you to deeper levels of understanding about physics. Two similar books that I have read are Surprises in Theoretical Physics and More Surprises in Theoretical Physics by Rudolf Peierls.
From the Preface
This book was written for senior schoolchildren and presents a series of physical paradoxes and sophisms differing in theme and complexity. Some of them were known long ago, yet most are published for the first time. “Sophism” and “paradox” are Greek words. A sophism is an argument, though apparently perfectly correct in form, actually contains an error that makes the final deduction absurd. A well-known sophism is “That which you did not lose, you possess. You have not lost horns, hence you possess them.”
On the contrary, a paradox is a statement that seemingly contradicts common sense, yet in fact is true. For example, as a popular Russian saying contends, “it is a fact, however incredible” that when combining velocities with the same direction, the resultant velocity is smaller than their arithmetic sum (this is one of the inferences of the special theory of relativity).
A study of sophisms and paradoxes need not be thought of as a waste of time. Indeed, they were esteemed by such eminent scientists as Gottfried Leibniz, Leonhard Euler, and Albert Einstein. Einstein was very fastidious about his books, and yet he had a shelf full of books on mathematical jokes and puzzles. Maybe it was his early love of original problems that developed his striking paradoxes has played an extraordinary role in the development of contemporary physics. We hope that this small collection will help its readers avoid making some mistakes. For example, senior schoolchildren and first—year students are often observed, in trying to solve ballistic pendulum problems and the like, finding the system’s velocity following an elastic collision by applying the law of conservation of mechanical energy only. Such mistakes will hardly be made again after studying the sophism in Problem 1.25 (a “violation” of the law of energy conservation).
The first section of the collection contains the problems, the second section gives short solutions. The latter are useful to check your own solutions and in the cases when a problem is difficult to solve on one’s own. The first two editions of the book were so popular that they quickly sold out. It has been translated into Bulgarian, Roumanian, German (two editions in GDR), Japanese, and the languages of the peoples of the USSR. Its success stimulated me to compose new paradoxes and sophisms, thus resulting in the present edition. In preparing it, I have omitted some problems, revised the text and solution of others, and added new ones.
The book was translated from the Russian by Valerii Ilyushchenko and was first published by Mir in 1987.
Thanks AlKaPRo for providing this book.
The Internet Archive Link and here
Follow us on The Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/mir-titles
Write to us: mirtitles@gmail.com
Updated: 15 January 2019
