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It was not always so. Books and published papers of 17th and 18th century science pioneers often recounted the creative process in detail, with all its false starts, dead ends, and failed hypotheses. Nowadays that is not considered proper style. There are physics problems and physics puzzles. I like the puzzles. This collection encourages one to seek simple, clever and insightful methods to arrive at the answer. I especially like those that yield to only elementary mathematics. Some can also be solved by tedious formal mathematical analysis, but only as a last resort. A few of these puzzles are quite old, with obscure sources. Some are my own invention. I have tried not to include puzzles whose correct answers can easily be found on the internet. Nit-pickers may note that, due to gravity, this motion won't lie in a single plane, for the balls will orbit lower than the swinger's hand. Ignore this distraction. Bridge designers take into account the maximum weight of traffic a bridge can

Physics puzzles. Physics questions fall into several categories. Questions about physical phenomena, dependent on real world data. Questions that require theory and mathematics. Textbook end-of-chapter problems are usually of this sort. Sometimes these have idealized assumptions. Questions that require sneaky, devious, clever, or insightful approaches. These are more properly called "puzzles". When we look at the history of the sciences we find that many advances originated as puzzles, often solved by an untidy process of brainstorming, and sometimes, dumb luck. After finding an answer, the pu

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