In this book about science in daily life, Julien Bohdanowicz explains that physics can help us understand how waste products have poisoned our environment, but also that it can show us how to treat waste. Following Georges Charpak’s new methods of teaching physics, the author does not expound his ideas in a rigid, monolithic manner that readers must accept unquestioningly. Instead, he makes them discover physics by themselves, step by step, through their own daily experience, and then has them formulate scientific principles and laws. He makes readers discover the laws of the conservation of energy, which can be summarised in the well-known adage: “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.”

Julien Bohdanowicz is an engineering student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Techniques Avancées.