Back of the Envelope [Physics] Problems

ajp.dickinson.edu

57 points·lmarinho··8 comments

Ed Purcell is probably one of the least famous but amazing expositor of Physics that I have come across. His book on electricity and magnetism (part of Berkeley Physics Course) is one of the best introductions to the topic (but again not very well known) Edit: Linking to the amazon page of the US edition, which seems to be out of print(http://www.amazon.com/Electricity-Magnetism-Berkeley-Physics...)

He also gave the classic talk "Life at Low Reynolds Number": http://brodylab.eng.uci.edu/~jpbrody/reynolds/lowpurcell.htm...

> I got into this through the work of a former colleague of mine at Harvard, Howard Berg. Berg got his Ph.D. with [Nobel Prize winner] Norman Ramsey

Norman Ramsey is also the name of a much younger yet contemporaneous Harvard professor of Computer Science (and a very prolific Stackoverflow answerer). (He is now at Tufts) I wonder how his name affected his career.

http://www.google.com/search?q=norman+ramsey

3rd edition in prep: http://www.cambridge.org/no/knowledge/isbn/item6869923/

This is good to hear, Thank you! Edit: the picture on the cover is that of the electric field of an electron as it approaches the speed of light. This was the only book I know that actually tried to illustrate this..I simply love the beautiful illustrations :)

I used his book in my class.

Has anyone attempted to recreate the original Fermi problem? Fermi was in a bunker during the first nuclear test, and approximated the power by measuring the displacement of paper shreds due to the shock wave.

Also this: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/leino/puzzles....

Does anyone know of any good books with these kinds of problems?

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