Quantify!: A Crash Course in Smart Thinking
Göran Grimvall is determined to help mere mortals understand how scientists get to the kernel of perplexing problems. Entertaining and enlightening, his latest book uses examples from sports, literature, and nature-as well as from the varied worlds of science-to illustrate how scientists make sense of and explain the world around us.\ These fun-to-read essays and easy-to-follow examples detail how order-of-magnitude estimation, extreme cases, dimensional analysis, and other modeling methods...
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Preface ix\ 1 Numbers 1\ 1.1 Numerical Literacy 1\ Babylon, Babble, and Billion 1\ Prefixes 3\ What Is the Point? 5\ 1.2 The Power of Logarithms 7\ Order of Magnitude 7\ Hot Air Balloons and Renard Numbers 9\ Finding Fraud in Figures 11\ 1.3 What Is Typical? 14\ The Height of an Adult 14\ Social Competence and Personal Encounters 17\ Hit by Returning Rocket 19\ 1.4 Estimates 21\ Is Anybody Out There? 21\ Sand, Sibyl, Olympic Medals, and Homeopathy 24\ Cover the Earth with Paper 27\ 2 Measures 30\ 2.1 What Is It on a Scale? 30\ The Richter Scale 30\ Nuclear Incidents and Accidents 32\ Natural Threats 35\ 2.2 Comparing Apples and Oranges 38\ Human Well-Being and Poverty 38\ Track and Field 40\ At Scout Camp 42\ 2.3 Units 44\ Going Metric-Inch by Inch 44\ Horsepower and Manpower 46\ The Loss of a Spacecraft 48\ 2.4 On the Road 51\ Left-Hand Traffic 51\ The Value of a Life 53\ Gasoline Here and There 55\ 3 Accuracy and Significance 58\ 3.1 Could You Be More Precise, Please? 58\ What Is Austria's Population? 58\ A Slim Waist 59\ Man on the Moon 62\ 3.2 Significant? 64\ Flunking 64\ A Change in Opinion 66\ Error Bars 68\ 3.3 Limit Values 71\ Will Your iPod Make You Deaf? 71\ Lethal Dose 73\ The Weakest Link 75\ 3.4 Fair Games? 79\ Winning by a Small Margin 79\ Accurate Timing 81\ Are All Sports Venues Equivalent? 83\ 4 Extrapolations 86\ 4.1 The Dangerous Exponential 86\ The Rule of 72 86\ A Problematic Reward 87\ Suddenly Nothing Was Left 90\ 4.2 The Ubiquitous Straight Line 92\ Dubious Extrapolations 92\ Moore's Law 94\ Low Radiation Level and Cancer 96\ 4.3 Scaling 99\ Big and Small Fish 99\ Gulliver 100\ Roasting a Turkey 102\ 4.4 Looking Ahead 104\ The Law of Diminishing Returns 104\ The Sign of the Second Derivative 106\ Lynx and Hare 109\ 5 Models 112\ 5.1 What Are the Chances? 112\ Proofreading 112\ Losing a Leg 113\ Sunday Traffic 115\ 5.2 Seeking the Optimum 117\ Tax Rates and the Autobahn 117\ Running to the Rescue 119\ Selecting the Best Golf Club 121\ 5.3 Focus on the Essential 124\ How Small Can a Mouse Be? 124\ The Age of the Earth 126\ A Loud Party 128\ 5.4 A Law or a Model? 130\ Ohm's Law Is Not a Law 130\ A Mad Pursuit 132\ Is Coulomb's Law Exact? 135\ 6 The Real World 138\ 6.1 Plausible, but Not Correct 138\ The Unridable Bicycle 138\ Church Windows and Lead Roofs 140\ The Bathtub Vortex 142\ 6.2 You See What You Want to See 145\ Waves Are Rolling In 145\ Galileo Galilei's Trial 147\ Submarines and Mink 148\ 6.3 Suddenly Something Happens 151\ Fishing Nets, Coffee Percolators, and the Web 151\ Goethe and the Height of Trees 153\ Supercooled Rain and Critical Mass 156\ 6.4 Engineering versus Science 158\ Slapstick 158\ Not a Schoolbook Problem 160\ Hoisting a Sack 163\ 7 Tricks of the Trade 166\ 7.1 A Crash Course in Science Thinking 166\ Dinghy, Anchor, and Pool 166\ Up and Down the Escalator 168\ The Floating Apple 170\ 7.2 Is the Formula Accurate Enough? 172\ Obesity 172\ Wind Chill Temperature 174\ The Size of a Ship 176\ 7.3 Characteristic Quantities 178\ How Deep Is Deep? 178\ The Coldest Day of the Year 180\ Galileo Galilei, Basketball, and Table Tennis 182\ 7.4 Impress Them! 184\ What Is Your BMI? 184\ The Aeolian Harp 186\ One Trick and Two Areas 188\ Epilogue: Seven Principles in Scientific Literacy 191\ Notes 199\ Index 211
\ SIAM NewsGrimvall's book should appeal to and amuse a wide audience, extending from professional scientists, teachres, school kids, newspaper columnists to the... average citizen.\ — Philip J. Davis\ \ \ \ \ \ Popular ScienceAn excellent piece of work with lots of fascinating information inside.\ — Brian Clegg\ \ \ \ Midwest Book ReviewEssays are fun, involving... and will appeal to both general readers and collections from high school into college grades.\ \ \ \ \ ChoiceA wonderful read for everyone, emphasizing how scientists and engineers tend to think about examples from daily life that are expressed by numbers... Highly recommended.\ \
