Books in English – Michael Grant

Waves · from the sea to spacetime

Waves

The Shape That Travels

The water at Grenen stays where it is. The air in an organ pipe stays where it is. And yet something runs across them both — a shape, an energy, an item of information — at a speed the medium itself decides.

The book follows that single observation through nine media: the sea, the atmosphere, the air, sound underwater, the solid earth, light, plasma, the borderlands, and finally spacetime itself. Optics, acoustics, geophysics and quantum mechanics turn out to be one chapter written in different media — and four words carry the whole way: stiffness, inertia, dispersion, resonance.

The cross sea at Grenen is not two seas colliding; the half-angle of a wake is 19°28′ at any speed; a tsunami is not a tall wave but a long one; and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge did not fall because of resonance. Along the way there is sound in lined ducts, the whales' channel in the ocean, the interior of the Sun and the chirp of gravitational waves.

English
Paperback & Kindle
49 chapters
Computed figures and my own photos
Also in Danish

Paperback Kindle – free sample Danish edition: Bølger

Quantum physics · popular science

Can My Cat Be Both Alive and Dead?

Schrödinger's Equation, 100 Years

The wave equation a hundred years on — from the unstable atom to the information paradigm.

The story begins with the problem that would not go away: why does the electron not crash into the nucleus? From there we follow the equation through the double slit, through Bell's inequality and the experiments that settled the question of local realism — and on to the modern reading, in which information is the quantity everything turns on.

The cat is there, of course. Not as a trick, but as what it was meant to be: an objection, not a punchline.

English
Paperback & Kindle
Also in Danish

Paperback Kindle – free sample

Mathematics · a voyage of discovery

Geometry

From a Point to Conic Sections

A little journey of discovery through shapes, angles and numbers — from the very first point to the ellipse, the parabola and the hyperbola.

We start with the point and the line, go on to the triangle, the quadrilateral and the circle, and meet Pythagoras' theorem as a tiling proof you can lay out yourself: four triangles in a windmill inside the square on the hypotenuse, and the same pieces rearranged into the other two squares.

Finally the cone is cut through, and the conic sections turn up everywhere: in the arches of bridges and domes, in the path of a thrown ball, in the satellite dish and the solar oven, in the elliptical orbits of the planets and in the comets that pass by only once.

English
Paperback & Kindle
For my twelve grandchildren
Also in Danish

Paperback Kindle – free sample Danish edition: Min geometribog

In Danish

My astrophoto book, written for my grandchildren, is so far available only in Danish.

Astronomy · for children and curious adults

My Astrophoto Book

Light from Long Ago · Min astrofotobog – Lys fra længe siden

A journey from our own field out to the distant galaxies — photographed all the way from Djursland through a small telescope.

The book begins with the Moon as you can see it from the garden and moves outwards: the planets, the star clusters, the nebulae and finally galaxies so far away that their light has been travelling for millions of years. Hence the title — what you see at night is not the sky as it is now, but as it was then.

Along the way there are constellations to find your way by, drawing activities and a sundial page. It is written for my grandchildren, but pitched so that an adult can read along and learn something too.

In Danish
Paperback & Kindle
Own astrophotos

Paperback Kindle – free sample

About the books

All the books are self-published through Amazon KDP and set up from scratch — text, figures and layout. The illustrations are my own: astrophotos taken from Djursland with a small telescope, and drawings and diagrams like many of those you will find around these pages.

The Danish books are written with my twelve grandchildren in mind. That turned out to be the best guide I could have had: if an explanation did not hold up for them, it did not hold up at all.

Questions, corrections or just a comment are very welcome — michael.h.grant@gmail.com. Back to the home page.