{"id":797,"date":"2008-09-17T03:41:14","date_gmt":"2008-09-17T08:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=797"},"modified":"2008-09-17T03:41:14","modified_gmt":"2008-09-17T08:41:14","slug":"thats-approximately-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/797","title":{"rendered":"That's Approximately Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

The First Excited State takes on approximations with Assume a spherical physicist<\/a><\/p>\n

Everybody who\u2019s taken any sort of math class knows that a statement like N+1 = N is simply ridiculous. Everyone, that is, except for the physicist. Let\u2019s say that N is a really huge number, like if someone dumped an entire truckload of M&M\u2019s in your driveway. If you turned your back on me to watch the truck drive away, and I threw another M&M in the pile while you weren\u2019t looking, would you really notice? What if I snuck one while you were looking to the sky to thank God for this miracle? No, you\u2019d really have no idea. So in this case, for all practical purposes, N+1 = N-1 = N. We make this approximation all the time in my statistical mechanics class, where N represents some astronomically huge number, like the number of water molecules in your glass.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s also the trick of rounding numbers to 1, 2 or 5 in order to get an approximation when a calculator isn’t handy. You can usually get within a factor of 2 and perhaps better, depending on how crudely you round things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The First Excited State takes on approximations with Assume a spherical physicist Everybody who\u2019s taken any sort of math class knows that a statement like N+1 = N is simply ridiculous. Everyone, that is, except for the physicist. Let\u2019s say … 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":[28,39],"tags":[88,130],"class_list":["post-797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math","category-physics","tag-approximations","tag-calculations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797","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=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}