{"id":13864,"date":"2013-07-10T03:00:06","date_gmt":"2013-07-10T08:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=13864"},"modified":"2013-07-10T03:00:06","modified_gmt":"2013-07-10T08:00:06","slug":"how-to-think-like-approximately-1-physicist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/13864","title":{"rendered":"How to Think Like Approximately 1 Physicist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Think Like a Physicist<\/a><\/p>\n

Physicists and estimation.<\/p>\n

Students (the vast majority of whom are engineers and chemists) invariably look at me like I\u2019ve sprouted an extra head when I do dimensional analysis tricks, though, and whenever I assign a problem asking for an estimate, I\u2019m all but guaranteed to get answers reported to all the digits that a calculator can muster, which misses the point.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve also had this happen even with other faculty from science and engineering departments. I\u2019ve had several meetings where I\u2019ve done some back-of-the-envelope toy model to check the plausibility of something or another, and get baffled stares from everybody else. Or arguments about how the round numbers I used weren\u2019t exact (\u201cBut we don\u2019t have 600 students in the first-year class. There are only 587 of them\u2026\u201d) It was a real shock the first time that happened, because I\u2019ve always thought of that as a general science trick, but I\u2019m coming around to the idea that it\u2019s really more of a physicist trick. And maybe, if you\u2019re looking for an explanation of what it means to think like a physicist, specifically, that might be the place to look.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I recall the first time I experienced this, in a physics class in college. The professor gave an answer to a question to within a factor of 2 faster than anyone with a calculator got to the more precise answer, and he explained that in a lot of (informal) cases, a factor of 2 or even order of magnitude would be sufficient \u2014 able to rule out possibilities or make a plausibility argument, or even check that you haven’t fat-fingered an answer on your calculator and gotten an obviously wrong answer. He was right, and I’v used the technique quite a bit. Later, in the navy, I heard this estimation technique called “radcon math” \u2014 the radiation control folks on a ship\/sub care mainly about the order of magnitude of a radiation dose when first assessing a situation, because that tells you the level of urgency should you need to cordon off\/evacuate an area. So it’s not just physicists, per se, but it’s plausible estimation is more prevalent in disciplines that do more computation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Think Like a Physicist Physicists and estimation. Students (the vast majority of whom are engineers and chemists) invariably look at me like I\u2019ve sprouted an extra head when I do dimensional analysis tricks, though, and whenever I assign a problem … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,33,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math","category-navy","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}