Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down — J. E. Gordon
Context I chose this book to develop intuition for how structures behave and how engineers reason about strength, stiffness, and failure — topics that are often treated too abstractly at school level. The book is recommended on the Cambridge Engineering reading list, and I am using it to build conceptual understanding rather than memorise formulas. Key ideas so far One idea I found particularly compelling is that, for a structure to support a load, it must deform slightly. This answered a question I had often wondered about: how apparently rigid objects can still respond to forces. ...