Spin by Roland Ennos

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Praise for THE WOOD AGE

Precise, almost mesmerizing detail – NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

A stunning book… Ennos’s knowledge of all things arboreal is vast and intricate… nothing less than a complete reinterpretation of human history and prehistory… written with enormous verve and pinpoint clarity… No review can match the richness of Ennos’s book… I felt like cheering – John Carey, SUNDAY TIMES

An original eye-opening perspective on just about everything, revealing the unlikely links between tightrope walkers and tyrannosaurs, trebuchets and tennis players, stunt cars and long jumpers.

From the time women first used rotating bobbins to twist thread and men whirled slings around their heads to throw stones, people have found spin fascinating and baffling in equal measure – hence its emergence into the political arena in the 1980s as a bye-word for deception, chicanery and obfuscation.

Now, in work of impressive breadth and depth, Roland Ennos finally demystifies the subject by showing how rotational motion dominates the workings of the world about us. Spin shaped the solar system, galaxies and black holes. It controls our climate and weather, from the periodic return of ice ages, and the global pattern of trade winds through to the local formation of hurricanes and tornadoes. Exploiting spin underpinned the progress of civilization, from the developments of the wheel – gears, pulleys, flywheels and lathes – that helped the old world gain global supremacy, to the systems that today power the industrial world – propellers, turbines, centrifugal pumps, impellers and electric motors. Even our own bodies are complex systems of rotating joints and levers.

But, Ennos argues, scientists seem to have an inbuilt propensity to ignore the everyday and prosaic. So seventeenth-century scientists developed the science of mechanics to explain the arcane phenomenon of the orbit of the planets rather than how machines work. And Newton’s laws have actually constrained our understanding of spin because they focus on linear motion and focus on mathematical analysis rather than on giving us an intuitive grasp of rotation. As a result few people realise how spin makes our planet habitable, or how it has been tamed by engineers to make our lives more comfortable. Meanwhile, biomechanics and sports scientists are only beginning to grasp how we balance, walk, run, swing and jump; how we throw projectiles and wield tools and weapons.

By freeing ourselves from our intellectual straight-jacket and seeing the world in terms of rotational rather than linear motion, Ennos shows how we can all learn to move about more gracefully, play sports more successfully – and ensure that like cats we always land on our feet. For be it natural or engineered, spin is what really makes the world go round.

ROLAND ENNOS is a visiting professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull. He is the author of successful textbooks on plants, biomechanics, and statistics, and popular books including TREES (Natural History Museum, 2001) and THE AGE OF WOOD (Scriber/Collins – as THE WOOD AGE, 2000/2001). He lives in England.

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: Scribner Delivery: 1 April 2022 Publication: Spring 2023 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 80,000–90,000 words

All rights available excluding US & Canada (Scribner)