In this book, you will learn how to make some amazing things: a carbon arc furnace, cloud chamber, mechanical stroboscope, radiometer, optical micrometer, electromagnet, microtome, spectroscope, and so many others. You will blow glass, catch bugs, and cut the ends off of power cords. You will learn how acids and alkalis taste, what lands of things live in a drop of water, and how your lungs draw in air. You will measure mass, density, volume, pressure, temperature, time, humidity, cosmic rays, conductivity, and optical polarization. You will isolate hydrogen, build an electric motor, grow rock candy crystals, and literally burn a record of the day's weather using a Campbell-Stokes sunlight recorder.

While there are a lot of neat things to build, not everything is about making equipment. To look at the apparatus alone would be to miss the point; to not see the forest for the trees. At its heart, this is a science book. Every project comes with a set of questions for you to investigate, frequently challenging you, asking Can you work like a scientist? Beyond these is something yet more: one of the most extraordinary collections of "science fair" research project ideas ever put to paper, with over 1,600 open-ended questions for investigation, spanning the fields of chemistry, physics, biology, and geology.