The figure library — page 2

• The skin that is not a skin
• The small bubble blows up the big one
• The thread that cannot stay a thread
• How high water will climb
• The angle a liquid makes with what it sits on
• The surface that pulls toward the stronger side
• The ring the drop leaves behind
• The barrier a new phase has to climb
• The angles a film has no choice about
• The pressure a charge puts on its own metal
• The film that goes black before it bursts
• The bubble that grows by counting its sides
• The tension that vanishes where the phases meet
• The surface whose thickness depends on the view
• The drop that will not merge

Every branch surface-energy draws, and what checks it

• Field lines are a choice, not a discovery
• The field before the lines were drawn on it
• One number for every point, and nothing at all is lost
• The attraction that needs no charge
• Nothing can be held still by a static field
• The potential is where the wanderers stop
• The shape that takes five numbers
• The field that keeps Greenwich time
• The zeros a handful of charges can make
• The voltage that bends an electron like glass
• The field a ring of wires lets through
• The water drops that charge themselves to a spark
• The atom whose nucleus is a reflection
• The path a charge takes is not its field line
• Two dipoles that agree everywhere but inside

Every branch vector-field draws, and what checks it

• The pressure that only knows depth
• Force multiplied, and nothing gained
• The surface a spin decides
• The depth past which it must sink
• The height a siphon cannot pass
• The block the water does not lift
• The push that has no direction
• The sea that stands lower because water gives
• The water that warms on the way down
• The rise a joule of heat buys
• The floodgate that opens at a chosen depth
• The bottle that pours at one rate however full it is
• The vessel whose level falls evenly
• The building that breathes through its doors

Every branch pressure-depth draws, and what checks it

• The floor that cannot be told from gravity
• The clock that runs slow lower down
• The clock that is wrong in two directions
• The term free fall cannot remove
• The parallelogram that will not close
• The two clocks that flew in opposite directions
• The clock that measures a height
• The column that is hotter at the bottom
• The clocks that must all slow together
• The clock that runs slow because it is warm
• The radius a mass adds that no circumference shows
• The redshift that weighs a dead star
• The light that climbs out of a cluster of galaxies
• The redshift the Sun's boiling hides

Every branch redshift-tower draws, and what checks it

• The answer that was not there before
• The angular momentum that is not a rotation
• Four states, and one of them is odd
• The force with no force in it
• The questions that can be asked together
• The turn that has to be made twice
• Two states where the counting says three
• The experiment that defines spin and cannot be done on it
• The value a gentle measurement returns
• The image made of frequencies
• The wait that sets the precision
• The echo that gives back everything but the wandering
• The atoms that measure better together
• The rod that turns when its magnetism flips

Every branch stern-gerlach draws, and what checks it

• Speeds that refuse to add, and the quantity that does
• The contraction no photograph shows
• The turn that two pushes leave behind
• The push that does not point where the body goes
• The motion that measures faster than light
• The brightness that is not the same for everyone
• Everything from an exchange of pulses
• The space that speeds live in
• The drag that was only an addition
• The river that sound cannot swim up
• The binary star that would be seen twice
• The spot that outruns light and carries nothing
• The wheel whose top cannot go twice as fast
• The angle a collider counts in logarithms

Every branch velocity-addition draws, and what checks it

• The packet that moves at another speed than its own crests
• The packet that will not keep its shape
• The speed that carries no signal
• The pipe that will not carry a low note
• The pulse two failures keep alive
• The mode that will not turn a corner
• Two tails that swap everything
• The coupler that does not care about the colour
• The loss that falls as the frequency rises
• The packet that bends with nothing pushing it
• The tone the whole Earth rings at
• The long pulse that arrives as a spike
• The plate that carries two kinds of sound
• The echo hidden in random noise

Every branch wave-packet draws, and what checks it

• Magnetism is electricity seen sideways
• The field nobody can transform away
• The disc that cannot be spun
• The one quantity a boost leaves alone
• Charge and current are one thing
• Six numbers, one object
• The charge that passes as a flash of light
• The beam that stops pushing itself apart
• The contraction the forces work out for themselves
• The spin that runs ahead of its own motion
• The magnet period that comes out as an X-ray
• The gyroscope a spinning Earth turns
• The photon a fast electron throws back
• The orbit that opens when E reaches cB

Every branch wire-frames draws, and what checks it

• The weight of the water that is not there
• Why a ship comes back upright
• Slide or topple
• The depth past which it must sink
• The block the water does not lift
• The body that displaces two things
• The balloon that leans the wrong way
• The log that floats on its corner
• The balloon that floats at a density
• The water the dent displaces
• The floating ice that still raises the sea
• The grounding line with nowhere to stop
• The balloon a cold morning lifts

Every branch buoyancy draws, and what checks it

• The bend at the boundary, and what it is really about
• The angle past which light cannot leave
• The reflection that happens where the glass is not
• The channel with no walls
• The angle that is two angles
• The angle at which total reflection stops being total
• The corner that sends light home
• The window a diamond is cut inside
• The mirror that lights a tenth of a micrometre
• The index that falls below one
• The drop that cannot hold the light it lets in
• The roof that splits a binocular's image
• The windscreen that feels the rain

Every branch critical-angle draws, and what checks it

• The frequency that gets an answer, and the quarter cycle nobody mentions
• The three ways of coming to rest
• The mass that makes another stand still
• The width that is a lifetime
• The resonance with a zero in it
• The resonance that refuses to leak
• The noise a high Q moves out of the way
• The clock that is pulled into step
• The note a bottle sings whatever its shape
• The noise that helps a weak signal through
• The tube that sings when heated low down
• The noise that warns a tube is about to sing
• The fork inside a watch

Every branch damped-response draws, and what checks it

• Entropy is a count, and the arrow of time is arithmetic
• The ceiling on every engine, set before it was designed
• The engine that pays back more than it takes
• The engine that has to finish
• The engine a fluctuation cannot run
• The temperature an engine really takes its heat at
• The work left in two buckets of water
• A fridge with no work going into it
• An engine with one number in it
• The cold reservoir overhead
• The squeeze a petrol engine is not allowed
• The engine that expands further than it compresses
• The cylinder that must not be cooled

Every branch engine-efficiency draws, and what checks it

• The slope, and the two directions that make it easy
• The force that takes what it needs
• Slide or topple
• The chatter a stiffer holder removes
• The silo that does not weigh what it holds
• The grip that is not a coefficient
• The part of the wrap that is actually gripping
• The grip that needs a little slipping
• The speed at which grip hands over to power
• The contact that slips before it slides
• The push a millimetre ahead of the axle
• The swing that dies in a straight line
• The rod that friction cannot decide about

Every branch friction-response draws, and what checks it

• The silo that does not weigh what it holds
• The angle that does not know the size of the heap
• The table statics cannot settle
• The heap that becomes a solid
• The big one comes to the top
• The hourglass that keeps time
• The pile that is never finished settling
• The gas that cools itself into clumps
• The sand that chooses a side
• The sound sand carries faster the deeper it goes
• The sand whose friction depends on how fast it flows
• The outlet that jams by chance
• The sandcastle a spoonful of water holds

Every branch granular-column draws, and what checks it

• The quantity nobody argues about
• The invariant that survives a boost
• Which came first, and who decides
• The string that breaks between two rockets
• The wall of silence behind a rocket that never stops
• The ship that never arrives at c
• The temperature of an acceleration
• Nothing is allowed to be rigid
• The clock that does not feel the turn
• The longest way round is the shortest clock
• The orbit that ages less than a throw
• The heat hidden in a Doppler shift
• The rocket in which light travels on circles

Every branch interval-hyperbola draws, and what checks it

• The knot the field cannot untie
• The frequency below which nothing gets in
• The whistle that arrives sorted
• The long-range force that does not reach
• The wave that dies with nothing to rub against
• The wall a plasma builds against itself
• The bias no battery supplies
• The bias a waveform can choose
• The frequency the sky returns only at a slant
• The sound a plasma carries on its electrons' heat
• The two beams that unravel each other
• The dust a plasma freezes into a crystal
• The product a fusion plasma has to beat

Every branch plasma-response draws, and what checks it