Friday, September 09, 2011

\CDers come up dry again.

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6 comments:

Tecumseh said...

10kt is just about 19kt? Boy, are \lesssims great. Not.

Where is the "Feynman weeps" label?

9/09/2011 9:47 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Fermi Sleeps, Feynman Weeps..... New Riffs from the Brothers of the Order of the Magnitude

9/09/2011 10:01 PM
Tecumseh said...

Pace Rot, Fermi was way off -- I.I. Rabi came much closer in his prediction, though of course others were totally off base:

Predictions ranged from zero (a complete dud) to 45 kilotons of TNT, to destruction of the state of New Mexico, to ignition of the atmosphere and incineration of the entire planet. This last result had been calculated to be almost impossible, although for a while it caused some of the scientists some anxiety. Physicist I. I. Rabi won the pool with a prediction of 18 kilotons.

Of course, I.I. Rabi came from Eastern Europe, and got his PhD from Columbia.

Later on, Rabi chaired Columbia's physics department from 1945 to 1949, a period during which it was home to two Nobel Laureates (Rabi and Enrico Fermi) and eleven future laureates, including seven faculty (Polykarp Kusch, Willis Lamb, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, James Rainwater, Norman Ramsey, Charles Townes and Hideki Yukawa), a research scientist (Aage Bohr), a visiting professor (Hans Bethe), a doctoral student (Leon Lederman) and an undergrad (Leon Cooper).

Sure enough, Der Rotter thinks Columbia is some random community college on the Upper West Side.

9/09/2011 10:13 PM
Mr roT said...

Fermi used scraps of paper in the shock to measure the blast.

Apparently Eastern Europeans that pass through Columbia don't even get the difference between theoretical considerations and reality.

This is what \CD can do to the mind in the absence of real BBQ.

9/09/2011 10:52 PM
Tecumseh said...

That was a bs way to measure the blast. Looking at chicken entrails is more scientific.

9/09/2011 11:09 PM
Mr roT said...

Uh. No.

9/09/2011 11:13 PM

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