In 1913 in Russian bookshops appeared a book by the outstanding educationalist, entitled Physics for entertainment. It struck the fancy of the young who found in it the answers to many of the questions that interested them.
Physics for entertainment had not only an interesting layout, it was also immensely instructive. In the preface to the 11th edition, Perelman wrote: "The main objective of Physics for entertainment is to arouse the activity of scientific imagination, to teach the reader to think in the spirit of the science of physics and to create in his mind a wide variety of associations of physical knowledge with the widely differing facts of life, with all that he normally comes into contact with".
In the foreword, the book’s author describes the contents as “conundrums, brain-teasers, entertaining anecdotes, and unexpected comparisons,” adding, “I have quoted extensively from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain and other writers, because, besides providing entertainment, the fantastic experiments these writers describe may well serve as instructive illustrations at physics classes.” The last edition(13th),in lifetime of author was published in 1936. One of the most interesting topic of the book is, the idea of a perpetual machine (a hypothetical machine which is able to run incessantly and can do some useful work) and perpetual motion. The book explains many attempts made to build such machine and reasons why they didn't work. Other topics included how to jump from a moving car, and why, “according to the law of buoyancy, we would never drown in the Dead Sea.”
Read more about this topic: Yakov Perelman