Structures. Why are they standing and why they fall apart. Gordon D.

In this book, James Gordon brilliantly manages to simply tell about the technically complex: what is the designs (natural and artificial), how they are arranged, how they work, what keeps them from destruction, and what is torn to parts, what physical laws are the reason and the reason and Who opened these laws. Informally and witty, but without excessive simplification, the author explains how powerful forces act, which help the buildings not to fall apart, do not fall under the weight of eight -lane automobile traffic, and restrained thousands of tons of water. And vice versa: why, due to such phenomena as tension, twisting, shift and compression, disasters still occur, wings of aircraft fall off and the legs of people break. Thanks to the relaxed presentation, the encyclopedic volume of facts, causes and consequences is perceived as a fascinating conversation that flies unnoticed and leaves the reader a pleasant feeling that he already knew about all this (or, in any case, guessed), and finally this knowledge was skillfully before him laid out on the shelves. The book is addressed to everyone who is interested in the physical foundations and the structure of the surrounding material world. In the second edition, errors and typos made in the first are fixed.