This study is aimed at first introducing a well-known discrepant event; inseparable phone books and
second, turning it into an experiment for high school or middle school students. This discrepant
event could be used especially to indicate how friction force can be effective in producing an
unexpected result. Demonstration, discussion, explanation and experiment steps are presented on how
to turn a simple discrepant event into an instructional activity. Results showed the relationships
between number of pages and force, as well as between amounts of interleave and force. In addition
to these, the mathematical equation for the total force between all interleaved pages is derived. As
a conclusion, this study demonstrated that not only can phone books be used, but also ordinary
books, to investigate this discrepant event. This experiment can be conducted as an example to show
the agreement between theoretical and experimental results along with the confounding variables.
This discr…