A REVENUE SHAKEDOWN CRUISE. Titanic went to sea after the most cursory of sea trials. We know she never completed that first trip. Titanic's Last Secrets suggests that readers re-think their perception of what happened to the ship. (Hint: all the movies get it wrong.) I have to write Book Review N^o. 6 in such a way as to avoid providing spoilers.

But let me pose a few questions.

1. A ship sinking is a wonderful opportunity to write a realistic related rate problem. Forget about that "sand falls on a conical pile" stuff. Take the displacement of the ship and the time it actually took to sink, then work backwards to determine the rate at which water is entering the ship.

2. A smaller White Star ship, Republic, was holed in four compartments by collission with Florida off Nantucket. Republic remained afloat for 38 hours, giving Florida and other ships summoned by radio time to take all the passengers off. Might Titanic's crew and passengers have been expecting their ship also to settle slowly?

3. The two large sections of Titanic leave 200 feet of ship unaccounted for. The decks at the after end of the bow section and at the forward end of the stern section are collapsed downward, as if they had been squeezed down. Why?

4. White Star specified that Olympic and Titanic be built to the minimum standards for steel strength specified by the British Board of Trade. Does that engineering decision have any bearing on the damage observed on the two remaining sections?

5. Britannic was completed to the scantlings of Olympic and Titanic after Titanic sank. The wreck of Britannic is in shallower water off the coast of Greece. It offers forensic evidence of modifications to the scantlings, possibly including modifications written in blood.

Titanic's Last Secrets offers answers to some of these questions.

If you want to see the spoilers, the book's thesis appears here, and some counterarguments are here.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)