We are back to our usual face-to-face meeting venue, the Radnorshire Room at the Radnor Community Building!. We gather beginning at 7pm; the program begins at 7:30pm.
Fermi Questions: Thinking Like a Physicist
Presenter: Jeremy Carlo, PhD
Jeremy is an Associate Professor of Physics at Villanova University. Fermi Questions are attempts to estimate complex quantities whose exact values may not be known. Some questions could be:
·How many grains of sand are there on a beach?
·If you built a stairway to the moon, how many steps would it have?
·How much would it cost to cover a car with postage stamps?
·How many dump trucks would be needed to cart off all the snow that lands on Pennsylvania in a year?
·How many extraterrestrial civilizations are there in the universe?
We'll explore ways to quickly estimate quantities like these, using order-of-magnitude estimates and approximations. Put on your thinking caps, and bring some scrap paper!