The physics of skiing : skiing at the Triple Point /

Moving beyond the popular explication of science through everyday experience (e.g., R.K. Adair's The Physics of Baseball, CH, Sep'90), Lind and Sanders offer a serious application of physics to the enhancement of skiing, intended to explain the "how and why" that underlies the "wow" of the sport. The logical audience is physicists who ski, to which coauthor Lind belongs. Nonskiing physicists may be drawn to the sport by reading this, but in any case those who teach should be enticed to use it as a main or supplemental text for its wealth of information on the physics of snow and the principles of mechanics and aerodynamics, illustrated through discussion and analysis of the techniques and equipment employed in various styles of skiing. Nonphysicist skiers will benefit from the practical information without necessarily following the underlying explanations. Finally, for readers who are neither skiers nor physicists (this reviewer included), or at least for historians of technology, it provides a case study in the life cycle of the relationship of science and technology, illustrating the stage when scientific knowledge is systematically applied to the improvement of a technology that, like so many, originated out of the "cut and try" school of experience. Upper-division undergraduate and graduate students. L. W. Moore; formerly, University of Kentucky