Helplessly devoured "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir. Maybe even nerdier than the Martian—implausible, silly, whatever, but infectiously fun. Makes me wish I'd had more Fermi problem solving in my life as a kid.
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It's never too late to start Fermi estimating! I've been wanting to get better at it myself and was thinking of starting a group to jointly practice and learn.
The Fermi Estimation course I took in grad school was one of the highlights of my PhD.
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For #FridayPhysicsFun, I want to introduce you to a part of physics that lets you reason about any question you may have about the world.
•How high can mountains be?
•How big are raindrops?
•How much does the atmosphere weigh?
It's called order of magnitude estimation.
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There was a super fun course on this at Caltech called "order of magnitude physics": its.caltech.edu/~oom/
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Yup, my professor had taken that course herself at Caltech and modeled our class on it and Sanjoy's textbook also came out of that class.
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