Splash Biography

Enrico Fermi had a penchant for making "Fermi estimates"--for example, he famously estimated the power of the first atomic bomb test by dropping a piece of paper and seeing how far it flew. Thus began a whole category of order-of-magnitude estimation questions called Fermi questions. Some famous Fermi questions include: How long would it take to read all of Wikipedia? How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? How many intelligent civilizations are there in the galaxy? Want to impress your friends by doing back of the envelope calculations? If we ask you: determine (without googling anything!) the distance from Pluto to the Sun divided by the width of a single HIV virus--are you confident you'll be able to get an answer accurate to within a factor of 10? Learn how to become a whiz at Fermi questions, join the class!