@@berman00 So I calculated that at about 820mph! You were going pretty damn fast! Shark attacks have really increased a lot in the last 20 years, apparently.
As a middle school science teacher, I use fermi estimates ALL THE TIME to answer crazy questions from my students that I have no way of 100% correctly answering on the fly
I think all my science teachers did the same. Lol Edit) Although I had a physics teacher that was too comfortable with the phrase "That's impossible" Real dream crusher. Lol
LMAO, that is what MY dad called them, waaaaaay back when I was a little tyke, about 50 years ago! He was an engineer/radio man for decades, along with helping to design the first radar systems for the downtown KCMO airport, about 7 decades ago. He had a solid understanding of sciences and math, and often used this method, literally calling it a SWAG! Thanks for the walk down memory lane! 😊
Actually on a second thought this can be a god-tier superpower on par with omniscience to a lesser degree though. So, in theory you can predict anything with this power. Assuming your approximation has a constant error you can always just correct it by using the constant. Stock market here I come
@@zzz_zzz_ZZZ_zzz_ZZZ_ZZZ_Z_z-ZZ that's why I'm watching this..find a constant deviation, program an EA and forward test it on commodities trading..lol
The best part of a Fermi estimation is that once you've done it, you have an incentive to check your work, providing yourself with even more points of confidence.
AAAAAAHHHHH!!!! PAAAAAIIIINNNN!!!!!! I broke my hand yesterday because of the hate comments I get all the time. I was so angry that I punched a hole in my computer. Please don't hate me, dear mera
The Drake equation is just a totally made up guess…it’s barely an equation. His guess just had great PR. Evidence?! 1 million intelligent civilisations in our universe (or galaxy) I forget……but, it could be none, it could be five…
Fermi guesses are PERFECT for making sure your "precise" calculations make sense. The funniest example I found of it is "How many piano tuners work in Chicago?" The author looked up the population of Chicago, and then guestimated their way to within 5% of the right answer. It was pretty impressive, NGL. Great work, as always!
The piano tuners one is supposed to be an original one by Fermi myself he used to test students with. I only think it was for New York rather than Chicago
Three statisticians go hunting. The first one takes a shot, missing 1m to the left. The second misses his shot 1m to the right. They all high five and go home.
I really think this should be taught in more courses than just physics. I was a physics major for 5 minutes before switching to engineering and my physics classes were the only ones to teach Fermi estimations. The thing is, this technique doesn't require any specific vault of knowledge, it just requires that you be taught how to think. Any student could learn this, regardless of major. It also would be super helpful for those annoying job interviews where someone asks you "How many pianos are in New York"?
I think it should be taught in algebra class. This sort of estimate strongly makes algebra useful and fun; and really is just an application of algebra - relations. Now that I say this, it actually almost seems criminal that it isn't usually taught in ~grade 6 algebra.
They actually are taught a bit in high school maths. That’s the exact format many of my teachers have used to convert between units in math class, such as minutes to hours to days, but they never name the Method or acknowledge that it could be used in such a way to estimate
@@bulldozer8950 Yeah - unit conversion and dimensional analysis are taught; the big leap that isn't taught is the idea that we can really abuse this to estimate things using very rough numbers, get within an order of magnitude, and feel what the order of magnitude means. It's crazy - like, we basically learn all the mathematical skills needed for this by high school; the final leap is realizing how we could use this! I think part of this is that math questions might actually focus too much on highly specific numbers that one may not have on a regular basis. Grading by exactly correct numbers; whereas trying to judge how a student handles a Fermi estimate is more like reading a small essay, I'd figure.
The answer to any job interview that asks "How many pianos are in New York" or similar questions is usually "goodbye". There is a fantasy that those kinds of questions demonstrate problem solving skills, but they really don't. You're correct that Fermi estimation would be the way to address those questions, but Fermi estimation is just one tool that you've either learned or not learned, and it's not a useful tool for most career fields where these kinds of questions get asked. I know your instinct is to think that they must be asking them for jobs where it makes sense to ask them, but they really aren't. And there have been studies done on the efficacy of the questions...and who asks them. The answers to those questions are not indicative of employee performance, meaning it's utterly useless to be asked them. However, being asked them does correlate strongly with bad employers.
That "Texas Instruments, sponsor us" at the end made me laugh my ass off. I'm sitting at work, on break, at a Texas Instruments facility in TX at this very moment
And I immediately hopped up to grab my TI-89 Titanium! ...then hopped up again to search for my TI-82 which was buried in my under-bed drawer ...then hopped up again to put batteries in both of them because I haven't touched either in almost a decade. But I knew where they were!
"When you consider the number of particles in the universe, or the age of the universe at the time of heat death, or the diameter of the universe, all numbers are basically zero."
@@relzyn5545 Neither is 0 or any negative number in any real sense, but it doesn't stop humans from using their concepts to mentally grasp things though.
@@IceMetalPunk *Wrong* , infinity is a number. To be more precise, infinity is an extended real number. It is not a real number, though. Just like i is a complex number, but not a real number. And j and k are quaternions, but not complex numbers. Another related concept is infinitesimals, numbers > 0 but less than 1/n for any natural number n, and their reciprocal, infinite numbers (not to be confused with infinity) greater than n for any natural number n, which exist as hyperreal numbers, though neither infinitesimals nor infinite numbers are real numbers. One way to understand how infinity fits in with the real numbers to make the extended real numbers is through stereographic projection. Each point on the line can correspond to a point on the circle, and infinity would be the point connecting the two ends. Thus infinity naturally completes the circle from negative large numbers to positive large numbers. This is even more important on the complex plane, where it instead sits as the north pole of a sphere. Points of infinity are a central study in complex analysis, where they're called "poles" and determine the value of path integrals based on the topological properties of the path around the poles, such as their winding number. This shows that not only does infinity fit in well with the rest of the complex numbers, but it is a central concept.
@@KickstandOptional thanks Papa! It’s always been interesting to me to find what trains of thought might have impacted my final conclusions. That way if I ever move past the “guesstimation” phase I know where I probably need more research
I feel like this should be properly taught in school. Over in Australia I’ve never once heard of this. Just feels like it’s a great way to get people to think about a problem instead of knowing the answer to a problem
What’s fun about this is once you have tour guesstimation next to the actual number, you can reverse engineer your estimations to find where you were off and posit why you where over/under on a number. Like the dump trucks- the truck might be 2 Kyles tall but the bed starts 1 Kyle up which makes it only 1 Kyle deep overall. Run that calculation and you’d be closer to the actual number. Fun!
ooh, and I'd imagine if you practiced this enough you'd improve your guestimation abilities as well from knowing how close or far you've been in the past
Kyle, you were actually even closer on the NBA question if you're counting the points scored in a normal season. The last two seasons were shortened due to covid so the totals were lower but 2018-2019 there were about 275,000 points scored. I know the point is just getting close by fermistimating but gotta give you the credit you deserve you total sports guy. Love the channel, keep it up
but wasn't his calculation way off? why would he multiple 32(Teams) x 100(total games) x 100(points)? This would mean that every Team plays 100 games per season, but Kyle meant to calculate that there are 100 games in total thru all teams per season, didn't he?
"within a value of 3" " you gotta be impressed by that... unless you're a seal." I may be wrong, but if I was a seal and I knew there are less than imagined i'd be pretty happy.
At a physics competition in high school that I took part in, there was a special section of problems to solve: estimation challenge. They didn't give any parameter values, we had to estimate them best we could. That was certainly out of my comfort zone, because all the problems would always have precise "here is X and Y, figure out what's Z". It was an interesting experience for sure! Good times :) Not to flex, but I managed to be a laureate on this thing, which gave me an easy entrance to a good university, and I work as a scientist now, and estimation is a very important part of my job!
@@ShizaanSil Did pretty well on my own fermi estimate for this, all in all. Don't recall how high it was. Figured maybe 10 mi, but then recalled I think that's actually Olympus Mons (mars), so dropped it to 2 mi, which seemed more accurate. A mountain is basically just a big triangle if you look at it from the side, but it's not equilateral, so let's figure it's maybe 2x as wide as it is tall. So that's a triangle with a 4mi base with a 2 mi height. Then we consider the 3D rotation, so we make it a cone (circle that moves up to a point) instead of a triangle. I'm thinking recalling that the prefix for volume of cone or sphere is 4/3 (unsure which one), and it's volume, so radius cubed (radius being half the base), and it's a circle, so definitely need a pi in there, then we also need the height, so formula is probably 4/3*pi*r^3*h. This gives us about 67 cubic miles. Converting to feet, we multiply by (5280 ft)^3 = 9.86x10^12 cubic feet. 2.1x10^12 is the actual value. This makes sense as volume constant is actually 1/3 for cones not 4/3 (that's for spheres). That gives us the much closer (within 18%) 2.465x10^12 cubic feet. Showing that it does pay to look up the correct formulas when doing fermi estimates :).
My freshman Physics teacher told me that you can even estimate how physical equations look like. Start from gathering as much as seemingly relevant input parameters and try to arrange them in an equation in a manner where the units cancel out until they matches the unit of the output.
I sincerely appreciate the segment showing how you did these in real time AND that you got one wrong and went back and fixed it. So often we only see the polished, finished product on UA-cam tutorials and it can be intimidating when you try to replicate it yourself. Thank you SO MUCH for showing that process!
the only issue is that the reworked equation was assuming every team in the NBA plays all 100 estimated games that happen in a single season... when only two teams can play in any one game.
Yeah this was a blast. Even estimating the size of Mt. Everest by figuring its probably 3 times as wide as it is tall, knowing it's about 30,000 feet tall, and ball parking a dump truck, I wound up about a factor of ten off (99B trucks), factor of 3 for the hair, and factor of 2 for the basketball scores. In the realms those answers wind up being, it's close enough for government work (the difference between 7 billion dump trucks and 100 billion dump trucks seems irrelevant). It's also pretty interesting to see that Kyle tends to underestimate, whereas I tend to overestimate. Useful to know when considering your estimated answers. I've done estimations similarly to this before, but didn't know it was a thing that could yield actually useful answers in so many places. This will be fun to try.
Dude this is so freaky and cool. When Kyle was doing the guesstimations for sharks I did my own even shoddier, even more imprecise measurements going “Yeah that sounds about right”. I guesstimated knowing the distance from my home in Vegas to the coast of California which is 300 or so miles (and I only know due to visiting family on the coast) then went “I think the coast is about two of that distance”, doubled it since I think I recall miles to km being vaguely “double the miles = km” (only just now remembering thats just for metric WEIGHT and I have no clue if that actually applies to distance) then asked from my experience at beaches and very vague knowledge of shark inspired beach hysterics if one shark per kilometer sounded right, then if two sharks per km sounded right - and it did So I ran the Fermi estimate numbers, 1 shark per 2km divided over 600km of coast = about 300 sharks off the coast right now. I sat there waiting to see how insanely off I was because no way my estimate is within a mile of this super smart science man with tons of statistics and figures (vs me, a highschool dropout who, yeah, LOVES hearing about the results of science but struggles to even sorta comprehend the processes and math involved in getting those results 95% of the time) yet LO AND BEHOLD. I WAS MORE SPOT ON THAN HIM This is the only situation in math I have ever heard of where less precise data and figures have been a boon, and I can only assume its due to the fact that he had a lot of precise and neutral numbers, with big and heavier numbers, resulting in a net skew towards larger estimations. Meanwhile my dumbass (probably, I havent checked) way underestimated the distance of the coast and (again, probably) way over estimated the amount of great white sharks that exist on the coast and so those both balanced out to a way more neutral number. I know no one cares or will read this but I just needed to write it down somewhere because this was such a wild and mind blowing experience for me. Never before have I truly experienced and utilized the sheer power and magic that is MATH to this insane degree, all thanks to Kyle. Thank you Kyle this is amazing stuff
I read it ! Theres every chance you were way off somewhere but it averaged out , more importantly you did it by yourself. I'm into astrophotography and my wife says just Google the pics theyre way better , but that's not the point , it's doing it for yourself. I mean why go camping when you own a house, why watch sport when it's far more fun to do it yourself. Why watch a reality soap when you have your own life to live.
I have been working stuff out like this my entire life, no one ever taught me it, it just seemed a logical way to guess things. Never knew it had a name and a defined method. You learn something new every day.
I am a pharmacist and use dimensional analysis all the time while working, but it applies in so many areas of life. It’s probably the single most useful mathematical tool I’ve ever learned.
So, because of this video, I just learned that this is how my dad taught me how to do math WAY back in elementary school... Which explains not only why I always loved math, but also why my math teachers hated me
I don’t know about anyone else, but my favorite part of each episode is the section after he says he doesn’t know what or how he’s going to fill the time as the Patreon names go by. It’s a very wonderful wrapup or behind-the-scenes moment for each episode that I really appreciate and look forward to
Kill hyle : Advocate for the great ✨TI 89 Titanium✨ calculator Also Kyle Hyle 14:01 : *Procedes to use phone calculator in front of the aforementioned great ✨TI 89 Titanium✨ calculator*
I've been doing a version of this for so long but was never taught it or even knew what it was. Now that I know the process properly I feel more confident in my estimates and now it's even easier. Learning is great.
At a guess: they would know pretty much their exact distance from the blast (they were the ones designing the experiment and the safety parameters). Inverse square law for distribution of the energy, compare movement to known quantity of TNT explosion, with sanity check from previous estimates. Edit: they would already know the maths for how suspended things move since they used rocket trails to track the shockwave on camera.
Yeah, I've actually calculated the number of seconds in a year before... And how many meters per second I drive, how long it would take to walk around the world, how many generations there has been since life began.... so it was funny to see the weird stuff I subconsciously do in my head being explained as something useful
@@Parodox306 - I wonder if the method was used before Fermi, whether he actually created the process or just popularized it. I’d like to believe someone like Archimedes or one of the Arab mathematicians came up with it, but sometimes the simplest solutions really do take a long time before someone envisions them.
@@queenannsrevenge100 I feel like the technique is something many people were aware of well before Fermi (look through the comments and notice how many people used it before knowing it had a name; hell, I've personally used it plenty of times before know who Fermi was), but he codified it in a way that made it more accessible. It's likely that many of the greats throughout history had similar strategies but used different language to describe the process, or just took it for granted, thinking it's what people naturally do.
@@Parodox306 I would put my money on your last guess. When I was in middle school our science teacher covered dimensional analysis for simple unit conversions, because it's a simple format, and I had the same "aha" moment the comment section is having now.
I really enjoyed watching you think through the problems that you were working on. I’m a former teacher, and I really enjoy your channel. You are a great teacher, and I’m going to recommend you to a couple of my friends who have kids who are in school. I think that they would get a lot out of watching & learning from you. Thank you for what you do.
Hey! Fellow educator/nerd here- I appreciate the real time problem solving / computing section of the video. It really helps build a human connection between the viewer and the host. Keep up the great work, Kyle & team! :)
When i was younger, i used to call this intuitive estimation....just imagine dimensions in your head and that's it...no numbers, no calculations, just imagine and extrapolate from the image
I didn't know this but I've been using Fermi estimates for years! It's such a convenient way to get a ballpark number. Yeah, you're never going to be close enough to get a homework problem correct but it makes for a great method to estimate weird things that come up at the bar between friends.
Thanks for this episode. I loved it when you first demonstrated this on that livestream on a channel that shall not be named but was never able to find back what it was called. This is such a great tool, you're doing the basilisk's work with content like this.
That just reminds me about the scientific method of Descartes which could theoretical solve any problem and Fermi is the dude who seem to have perfectly understood this mindset.
I love how this is so intuitive I had no idea I was doing it. I use conservative Fermi estimation in all my budgets. ~2.5 * ~10 ~= 25. Call it 24 to be safe; And then whatever values your budget spits out are close enough but will trend downward in your favor; So I could accidentally splurge on that plushie,tangent; I love semi-colons, I had to get from Kyle but I know that I have about $500 of spare money between my Budgeted limit and my Actual limit so that extra $20 doesn't matter and I can instead focus on why my connection string closes before I can complete my write operation.
I love the whole process of the equation, it literally shows one, everyone makes mistakes and two, goddamn is it hard but possible. Just takes a lot of good understanding of what it is your working with.
For a while (idk if it still exists) there was an event in Science Olympiad name Fermi Questions, that was basically just a bunch of random Fermi questions that you get points based on how many orders of magnitude your estimations were off. My favorite is still "How many episodes of anime could you have watched from the birth of the Sun to now?"
@@lancebradshaw4829 Do you know how much was used? If you don't, I'd love to see the calculation of how to work it out, even just as a partial equation. I don't know much about the topic but I'm really curious.
@@Ray-uf8dj Some quick research says that the core weighed 6.19 kilograms (13.6 pounds). However, it was a plutonium-gallium alloy, so I don't know how much of that was actually plutonium. Working out the maximum possible yield of a given mass of plutonium would involve looking at the difference in mass between the initial plutonium and that of the elements that are produced by the reaction (the so-called "mass defect"). The products weigh less because a small amount of the mass is converted into energy. I'll probably try to send an example calculation on your profile or something later.
I had no idea this was called Fermi Estimation. I just kinda roll my eyes backwards into my sockets (that's not weird, you're weird) and plug some figures to estimate values like jelly beans in a jar. This was fun.
My high school physics teacher thought me to do this I was the only one in my college that knew about this so I'm glad it's being shared by someone so influential and well known
This may be the best video on UA-cam. Even before you started estimation problems in real time. Which was a really nice touch; indeed totally takes the video to a new transcendent level.
When I was a kid, my school did a "how many jelly beans are in this bottle" challenge. I used this breakdown to accurately guess the winning number within 10 beans. I felt super smart for a faith grader.
When you showed the result of the shark estimate I wondered how you came to this conclusion, but then I actually got to 972 using only the given numbers and I have to say I`m kinda proud of myself. As always thanks for the video and keep going my favourite science communicator.
I've been doing this all my life to answer "nonsense" questions for my own amusement--I had no idea anyone else did this or that there was any validity to it! I am pleased to hear I'm in good company.
I knew there had to be a name for it!!! I've been able to do pretty "accurate guesstimates" since I learned averages and fractions, it clicked for me. I'm really happy to hear it's a thing and that I'm not just randomly pulling numbers out of my butt. I knew I subscribed to you for a reason!
Instead of googling it, you could do a Fermi estimation of the volume of Mount Everest by approximating it as a cone with a base length and height of 29,000 ft, which gets you a volume (via v = pi*h*b^2 / 3) of ~6.4 * 10^12 ft^3. Combining with Kyle's estimate for the volume of a dump truck, this gets a Fermi estimation of ~5 * 10^9, or 5 billion dump trucks, considerably closer to the value of 6.4 billion dump trucks listed at the end.
Haha, for the great white shark I simply said, the coast of California is about 840 miles and there's maybe 1 great white shark per mile of coastline. I got 840 great whites with only 2 guesses.
For the shark question, I did this: Lets say the shore area is 25km from the coastline Lets say that the coast is a 500km long, just order of magnitude Lets say that each shark has a territory of 5x5 km So the amount of sharks = 25×500÷(5×5)=12500÷25=500
"I have stood next to a big dump truck before" describes one of the mini trucks you see in cities not a normal one thats 2 or 3 stories tall and 3 lanes wide
The problem with the Drake Equation is that several of the variables are absolute unknowns (e.g. the probability of life developing on a planet). They can be anywhere from 100% to 1 out of the total number of planets in the universe (that 1 being Earth). So it's categorically a useless equation. In the extraordinarily unlikely situation that we discover life elsewhere in the universe, that would change everything and make the equation useful as we'd then have a second instance.
That is cool. But I'd need a lot of practice. 2:47 I love conversion fractions. Some people find them annoying, I find them freeing. I even worked them into my app. 17:58 The Power of Fermi Estimates You!
And the best part is that today, in school, I asked a colleague to ask me a question that could be estimated and then checked on google. She asked me how many mosquitos are there. I said that each human has about one mosquito bite per night and that mosquitos only live in the summer and half of spring => 1/3 of the year so 100 days. This would mean that there are 100 mosquitos per human. But I remembered from an insect lesson a few years ago that a mosquito feeds on about 5 people so I got that there are 20 mosquitos for each human. And because there are 7.5 billion humans => there are 150 billion mosquitos. Do you want to know the actual number of mosquitos? 178 billion! Only 28 billion off!!! That’s pretty cool...!
In principle I like the idea as it's an analytical way to make estimates. And just as a good thought experiment to keep your mind sharp. However, I think the importance of being confident in your assumptions was very understated. It's all well and good to try to break down the problem into a series of smaller guesses and hope that the over- and underestimates will generally cancel each other out. But all it will take is for just one of those broken down guesses to be WAY off to scuttle the whole process. This is why I suspect Kyle immediately knew he shouldn't estimate the volume of Mount Everest: a mountain is just so unfathomably huge and irregularly shaped that it would be extremely difficult to do back-of-the-envelope math and be somewhat accurate with it. The chances of being extremely off the mark are just too high. This to me is one of the big pitfalls of this method, and why I can't envision a whole lot of scenarios where the tradeoff of accuracy for speed would be worth it. Short of corner-cases like being camping in the wilderness somewhere, or having an extremely time-sensitive issue where the clock is ticking and speed is imperative. I'd rather someone just look up a few more of the figures to have a better grounded sense of the problem. I'm also uneasy with the idea that for many of these problems - unless you're able to find an extremely relevant data source (like an actual measurement of some strange elderly Luddite's hair, or a direct sample of shark populations off the coast of California) - your "official" answer that you consult to check things is itself no more than a slightly refined case of a Fermi estimate with a more accurate foundation of broken down numbers used to calculate it. I think the "sanity check" step is another one that was not emphasized enough. People need to really think of what they might have missed and how they might be wrong. There are many of these problems where I could see there being mitigating factors that would make the real result strongly diverge from your estimate. For example, for the hair problem it doesn't account for the fact that hair grows at different speeds throughout our lives (hair growth slows as you age). Also, there's something call "terminal length" which is the length your hair stops growing at (somewhat of a misnomer as it doesn't actually stop but reaches a sort of equilibrium where hair loss and other wear and tear from damage happens fast enough that growth can't keep up with it). In the dump truck example, moving even a moderately massive amount of material, we'd have to also account for spillage, settling, and erosion from the wind/elements, among other things. Even at the scale of a major construction site I'm sure these are important factors, let alone for a hypothetical scenario involving moving an entire mountain.
This is really cool! I used the Fermi estimate and got these results: 1. 8cm/month x 12month/year x 85years/lifetime = 8160cm = 81m per lifetime. This is off by quite a lot (factor of 8) 2. I didn't even try to guess this one because I know nothing about basketball, I don't even know how many games are played each day, how many days does the competition last, and how many points the players score in one game 3. I know Everest is around 8km tall, and I've seen pictures of it so I assume it has the shape of the cone, the base is about 20km in diameter because it looks right. Then I estimate a dump truck is 5m x 3m x 3m in volume, so doing the calculations [(1/3)*8π*10^2*10^9] / (5*3*3) = 1.86*10^9 dumptrucks which is 1.86 billion dumptrucks. I'm surprised how close I got this one
I've done quite a few calculations like these my whole life. It's fun to guestimate answers like these. What I didn't know was that it's okay to be off by a factor of 2 or 3. I always felt like this was way too much to be considered close.
At least in science that deals with big numbers, anything that lands in the same number of digits, or same order of magnitude, is extremely close. Even being off by a factor of 100 (two orders of magnitude) can be considered fairly close in some contexts.
The example of canceling out units is what I would have students to to figure out crazy things. Like, “say a tree grows 5 feet in a year. How many miles per hour does it grow?”
I feel like this is how we all think when estimating things of this nature, only we don't necessarily think about the process. I suppose we do sometimes, if we're explaining it or trying to work it out on paper, but mostly it isn't a mind blowing thing. I mean, cool video though--don't get me wrong!
I had a professor in orbital mechanics who could guesstimate distances, figures, orbital times, etc. this way *without a calculator* and be within 10%-20% of the real answer. It was very impressive.
Lol, I opened this comment box to say that each TEAM plays approx 100 games/season, and as soon as I did you said "I need to go back to the basketball one" Bravo. Also, watching you do the dimensional analysis, especially the first one with all the crossing out and readjusting, gave me flashbacks to the school days. Pretty sure all of my analyses look like your first one.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Police officer: Sir, do you know how fast you were going?
Me: *Inhales*...
I don't know for sure, but my guess is about one half a moon distance per shark attack
But officer, speed is relative!
I'm reasonably sure I didn't break the sound barrier.
@@berman00 So I calculated that at about 820mph! You were going pretty damn fast! Shark attacks have really increased a lot in the last 20 years, apparently.
This made me laugh so hard I almost peed my pants
As a middle school science teacher, I use fermi estimates ALL THE TIME to answer crazy questions from my students that I have no way of 100% correctly answering on the fly
I think all my science teachers did the same. Lol
Edit) Although I had a physics teacher that was too comfortable with the phrase "That's impossible"
Real dream crusher. Lol
@@ToxicTerrance That's when you say, "It's impossible for you, but not Fermi."
@@BigDaddyWes great pun sir
So you lie to your students regularly... nice
@@lunartransport5461 what ?
I remember doing these kinds of exercises in school. My dad calls these SWAGs: Scientific Wild A$$ Guesses
LMAO, that is what MY dad called them, waaaaaay back when I was a little tyke, about 50 years ago! He was an engineer/radio man for decades, along with helping to design the first radar systems for the downtown KCMO airport, about 7 decades ago. He had a solid understanding of sciences and math, and often used this method, literally calling it a SWAG!
Thanks for the walk down memory lane! 😊
Show your SWAG! 🤣
@@MaryAnnNytowl you're welcome! 😀
I doubt any dad to be that cool
That's actually a proper phrase! Wikipedia it lol
Thanks Kyle, now I can get every question on my math tests almost right.
"I have approximate knowledge of many things"
@@maoman4855 would this count as a shitty superpower?
@@zzz_zzz_ZZZ_zzz_ZZZ_ZZZ_Z_z-ZZ yoooo definitely should be
Actually on a second thought this can be a god-tier superpower on par with omniscience to a lesser degree though. So, in theory you can predict anything with this power. Assuming your approximation has a constant error you can always just correct it by using the constant. Stock market here I come
@@zzz_zzz_ZZZ_zzz_ZZZ_ZZZ_Z_z-ZZ that's why I'm watching this..find a constant deviation, program an EA and forward test it on commodities trading..lol
The best part of a Fermi estimation is that once you've done it, you have an incentive to check your work, providing yourself with even more points of confidence.
"Is that a firm estimate?"
"No, it's a Fermi estimate."
"Isn't that what I just asked?"
"almost"
@@dinamosflams *well yes but actually no*
@@dinamosflams lmfao
Three replies in and I already love this thread
@@anchovybushwack472 make that four.
"The air's moving around at around 2 KpH in here by the way." Two Kyles per Hill? WHERE IS THIS OTHER KYLE?
I actually can't breathe lol
he's on the hill of course
Kilo-pascals per hectare doesn't sound right in any world...
But I've seen even worse measurement systems so I'll take it
He'll be here in another hour
"A few years ago when I was trapped in a formless, emotionless void-".
Ah, so working on Because Science
Yes, that's the point
AAAAAAHHHHH!!!! PAAAAAIIIINNNN!!!!!!
I broke my hand yesterday because of the hate comments I get all the time. I was so angry that I punched a hole in my computer. Please don't hate me, dear mera
I have ascended, I've received the fabled AxxL reply
@@niamhythedegen *AxxL
@@AxxLAfriku ah yes of course, how foolish of me
I love how the Drake equation is simply a Fermi estimate, jumbo sized.
i use this method to estimate how much dough will be needed for tomorrow so i can make enough pizza that customers will order that day ^^
@@mlembrant I do it too for all prep
Also yes it basically is.
Yeah same, whatever that means
The Drake equation is just a totally made up guess…it’s barely an equation. His guess just had great PR. Evidence?! 1 million intelligent civilisations in our universe (or galaxy) I forget……but, it could be none, it could be five…
Fermi guesses are PERFECT for making sure your "precise" calculations make sense.
The funniest example I found of it is "How many piano tuners work in Chicago?"
The author looked up the population of Chicago, and then guestimated their way to within 5% of the right answer. It was pretty impressive, NGL. Great work, as always!
The piano tuners one is supposed to be an original one by Fermi myself he used to test students with. I only think it was for New York rather than Chicago
"what's 9+10?"
Enrico Fermi: "21"
Three statisticians go hunting. The first one takes a shot, missing 1m to the left. The second misses his shot 1m to the right. They all high five and go home.
*29
Eh, it's the right order of magnitude. Close enough.
Once you've seen lecturers estimate pi as 1 and 10 in the same lecture, anything is reasonable.
@@Joseph125 engineers, amirite?
@@Joseph125 π = √g = e = 3
"You are technically correct. The best kind of correct."
I feel like this is a Dr Who quote. Cannot confirm.
Hermes Estimation
@@apocalypseinheritor1523 Futurama.
To quote the great beurocrat #1
The lead burecrat dude in the main Burecrat office from Futurama?
I really think this should be taught in more courses than just physics. I was a physics major for 5 minutes before switching to engineering and my physics classes were the only ones to teach Fermi estimations. The thing is, this technique doesn't require any specific vault of knowledge, it just requires that you be taught how to think. Any student could learn this, regardless of major. It also would be super helpful for those annoying job interviews where someone asks you "How many pianos are in New York"?
I think it should be taught in algebra class. This sort of estimate strongly makes algebra useful and fun; and really is just an application of algebra - relations. Now that I say this, it actually almost seems criminal that it isn't usually taught in ~grade 6 algebra.
They actually are taught a bit in high school maths. That’s the exact format many of my teachers have used to convert between units in math class, such as minutes to hours to days, but they never name the Method or acknowledge that it could be used in such a way to estimate
@@bulldozer8950 Yeah - unit conversion and dimensional analysis are taught; the big leap that isn't taught is the idea that we can really abuse this to estimate things using very rough numbers, get within an order of magnitude, and feel what the order of magnitude means. It's crazy - like, we basically learn all the mathematical skills needed for this by high school; the final leap is realizing how we could use this!
I think part of this is that math questions might actually focus too much on highly specific numbers that one may not have on a regular basis. Grading by exactly correct numbers; whereas trying to judge how a student handles a Fermi estimate is more like reading a small essay, I'd figure.
The answer to any job interview that asks "How many pianos are in New York" or similar questions is usually "goodbye".
There is a fantasy that those kinds of questions demonstrate problem solving skills, but they really don't. You're correct that Fermi estimation would be the way to address those questions, but Fermi estimation is just one tool that you've either learned or not learned, and it's not a useful tool for most career fields where these kinds of questions get asked. I know your instinct is to think that they must be asking them for jobs where it makes sense to ask them, but they really aren't.
And there have been studies done on the efficacy of the questions...and who asks them. The answers to those questions are not indicative of employee performance, meaning it's utterly useless to be asked them. However, being asked them does correlate strongly with bad employers.
My guess is 80.000
That "Texas Instruments, sponsor us" at the end made me laugh my ass off. I'm sitting at work, on break, at a Texas Instruments facility in TX at this very moment
Please sponsor him
So.... Is that a yes?
And I immediately hopped up to grab my TI-89 Titanium! ...then hopped up again to search for my TI-82 which was buried in my under-bed drawer
...then hopped up again to put batteries in both of them because I haven't touched either in almost a decade. But I knew where they were!
@@Upstart051They're likely just an employee, who does not have the power to do that.
Title: How to estimate anything
Me: All non-infinity numbers round to zero
"When you consider the number of particles in the universe, or the age of the universe at the time of heat death, or the diameter of the universe, all numbers are basically zero."
infinity isn't a number smh
@@relzyn5545 Neither is 0 or any negative number in any real sense, but it doesn't stop humans from using their concepts to mentally grasp things though.
@@Dr_Andracca That's... not true. 0 and negative numbers are numbers. Infinity is literally not a number because it doesn't act like numbers.
@@IceMetalPunk *Wrong* , infinity is a number. To be more precise, infinity is an extended real number. It is not a real number, though. Just like i is a complex number, but not a real number. And j and k are quaternions, but not complex numbers. Another related concept is infinitesimals, numbers > 0 but less than 1/n for any natural number n, and their reciprocal, infinite numbers (not to be confused with infinity) greater than n for any natural number n, which exist as hyperreal numbers, though neither infinitesimals nor infinite numbers are real numbers.
One way to understand how infinity fits in with the real numbers to make the extended real numbers is through stereographic projection. Each point on the line can correspond to a point on the circle, and infinity would be the point connecting the two ends. Thus infinity naturally completes the circle from negative large numbers to positive large numbers. This is even more important on the complex plane, where it instead sits as the north pole of a sphere. Points of infinity are a central study in complex analysis, where they're called "poles" and determine the value of path integrals based on the topological properties of the path around the poles, such as their winding number. This shows that not only does infinity fit in well with the rest of the complex numbers, but it is a central concept.
"How many great white sharks are swimming off the coast of california?"
All of them, you don't swim on a coast
Badum tss
"All the live ones." Great white sharks need to swim to breathe.
Found the A.I.
checkmate rico fermi
off a coast genius
What’s even more fun is using the right answer to triangulate, cross reference, and analyze my guesstimation biases
YESSS
I was raised badly and adopted this thinking style
Rather, not normal.
This is the kind of nerd representation that we need. Good on ya, Hunter.
@@KickstandOptional thanks Papa! It’s always been interesting to me to find what trains of thought might have impacted my final conclusions. That way if I ever move past the “guesstimation” phase I know where I probably need more research
@@UA-camCommenter8
Using the accuracy of your guesstimates to guesstimate the biases that influenced them.
This guy sciences.
"I've stood next to a large dump truck before" as Kyle halfway smirks at the camera.
Thicc aria now canon
That killed me.
That look absolutely cracked me up as well!
I'm surprised there weren't more dirty "firm" puns throughout this video...
thicc vampire mommy?
I feel like this should be properly taught in school. Over in Australia I’ve never once heard of this. Just feels like it’s a great way to get people to think about a problem instead of knowing the answer to a problem
Also, last time I checked, we have great whites down here too...
But we don't exist, right flat earthers?
@@bishoptrees Aren't all whites great? Okay, I'm going to go sit in the corner.
@@alexandergremory9468White supremacists be like
@@bishoptreesif you divide by 4 instead of 3, the answer he came up with would be even more accurate...
What’s fun about this is once you have tour guesstimation next to the actual number, you can reverse engineer your estimations to find where you were off and posit why you where over/under on a number. Like the dump trucks- the truck might be 2 Kyles tall but the bed starts 1 Kyle up which makes it only 1 Kyle deep overall. Run that calculation and you’d be closer to the actual number. Fun!
ooh, and I'd imagine if you practiced this enough you'd improve your guestimation abilities as well from knowing how close or far you've been in the past
@@DialecticRedgod i love how yall talk about this like its a superpower or something 😭
Kyle, you were actually even closer on the NBA question if you're counting the points scored in a normal season. The last two seasons were shortened due to covid so the totals were lower but 2018-2019 there were about 275,000 points scored. I know the point is just getting close by fermistimating but gotta give you the credit you deserve you total sports guy. Love the channel, keep it up
My guess was 230,400. It feels so good to be vindicated.
but wasn't his calculation way off? why would he multiple 32(Teams) x 100(total games) x 100(points)? This would mean that every Team plays 100 games per season, but Kyle meant to calculate that there are 100 games in total thru all teams per season, didn't he?
@@notme907 no I think it worked out because he was assuming 100 games per season per team
@@bWOOOPdeWooop ah yeah would make more sense that way.
@@notme907 yeah initially I thought he meant 100 games total when he was thinking out loud
"within a value of 3" " you gotta be impressed by that... unless you're a seal."
I may be wrong, but if I was a seal and I knew there are less than imagined i'd be pretty happy.
and then sad that Gerald was eaten last year anyway :-(
That's still a lot more than you want as a seal.
At a physics competition in high school that I took part in, there was a special section of problems to solve: estimation challenge. They didn't give any parameter values, we had to estimate them best we could. That was certainly out of my comfort zone, because all the problems would always have precise "here is X and Y, figure out what's Z". It was an interesting experience for sure! Good times :) Not to flex, but I managed to be a laureate on this thing, which gave me an easy entrance to a good university, and I work as a scientist now, and estimation is a very important part of my job!
Nice to read your experience!
"No this isn't cheating, this is using what we have available."
So are you saying that I can just google answers instead of using this method?
Not gonna lie, if he estimated the volume of Everest that would be way cooler
@@ShizaanSil I was thinking he'd model Everest as a cone and do that math lol
@@ShizaanSil Did pretty well on my own fermi estimate for this, all in all. Don't recall how high it was. Figured maybe 10 mi, but then recalled I think that's actually Olympus Mons (mars), so dropped it to 2 mi, which seemed more accurate. A mountain is basically just a big triangle if you look at it from the side, but it's not equilateral, so let's figure it's maybe 2x as wide as it is tall. So that's a triangle with a 4mi base with a 2 mi height. Then we consider the 3D rotation, so we make it a cone (circle that moves up to a point) instead of a triangle. I'm thinking recalling that the prefix for volume of cone or sphere is 4/3 (unsure which one), and it's volume, so radius cubed (radius being half the base), and it's a circle, so definitely need a pi in there, then we also need the height, so formula is probably 4/3*pi*r^3*h. This gives us about 67 cubic miles. Converting to feet, we multiply by (5280 ft)^3 = 9.86x10^12 cubic feet. 2.1x10^12 is the actual value. This makes sense as volume constant is actually 1/3 for cones not 4/3 (that's for spheres). That gives us the much closer (within 18%) 2.465x10^12 cubic feet. Showing that it does pay to look up the correct formulas when doing fermi estimates :).
@@mclason we wouldn't be here if we didn't know what a cone is and what a radius is
@@1999Fabion probably but doesnt hurt to clarify. Also radius in thst case waas half the base of the triangle, so slightly less obvious.
My freshman Physics teacher told me that you can even estimate how physical equations look like. Start from gathering as much as seemingly relevant input parameters and try to arrange them in an equation in a manner where the units cancel out until they matches the unit of the output.
"My TI is out of battery". This is the story of my engineering life
Taking a heat transfer final when your calculator is dead. Not fun.
@@Virsconte I know that feel... Doing as much as you can by hand and using what's left of the battery to finish it, hopping it doesn't die on you
That's how me and my dad solve discussions when we drink
What a terrible joke.
@@GraemeGunn I don't think it's meant to be- it's not that unreasonable to grab a napkin and a pen and start writing down numbers
My dad and I
And the history of guiness world records actually started in a similar way
@@davidechols2016 shut up dad
"But this is going to be difficult....... even Fermi."
hehe nice one
I sincerely appreciate the segment showing how you did these in real time AND that you got one wrong and went back and fixed it. So often we only see the polished, finished product on UA-cam tutorials and it can be intimidating when you try to replicate it yourself.
Thank you SO MUCH for showing that process!
@@AspynDotZip Same here - but ironically the first estimate was closer to the truth.
the only issue is that the reworked equation was assuming every team in the NBA plays all 100 estimated games that happen in a single season... when only two teams can play in any one game.
Yeah this was a blast.
Even estimating the size of Mt. Everest by figuring its probably 3 times as wide as it is tall, knowing it's about 30,000 feet tall, and ball parking a dump truck, I wound up about a factor of ten off (99B trucks), factor of 3 for the hair, and factor of 2 for the basketball scores. In the realms those answers wind up being, it's close enough for government work (the difference between 7 billion dump trucks and 100 billion dump trucks seems irrelevant).
It's also pretty interesting to see that Kyle tends to underestimate, whereas I tend to overestimate. Useful to know when considering your estimated answers.
I've done estimations similarly to this before, but didn't know it was a thing that could yield actually useful answers in so many places. This will be fun to try.
Learning and solving problems can get pretty messy
Dude this is so freaky and cool. When Kyle was doing the guesstimations for sharks I did my own even shoddier, even more imprecise measurements going “Yeah that sounds about right”. I guesstimated knowing the distance from my home in Vegas to the coast of California which is 300 or so miles (and I only know due to visiting family on the coast) then went “I think the coast is about two of that distance”, doubled it since I think I recall miles to km being vaguely “double the miles = km” (only just now remembering thats just for metric WEIGHT and I have no clue if that actually applies to distance) then asked from my experience at beaches and very vague knowledge of shark inspired beach hysterics if one shark per kilometer sounded right, then if two sharks per km sounded right - and it did
So I ran the Fermi estimate numbers, 1 shark per 2km divided over 600km of coast = about 300 sharks off the coast right now.
I sat there waiting to see how insanely off I was because no way my estimate is within a mile of this super smart science man with tons of statistics and figures (vs me, a highschool dropout who, yeah, LOVES hearing about the results of science but struggles to even sorta comprehend the processes and math involved in getting those results 95% of the time) yet LO AND BEHOLD. I WAS MORE SPOT ON THAN HIM
This is the only situation in math I have ever heard of where less precise data and figures have been a boon, and I can only assume its due to the fact that he had a lot of precise and neutral numbers, with big and heavier numbers, resulting in a net skew towards larger estimations. Meanwhile my dumbass (probably, I havent checked) way underestimated the distance of the coast and (again, probably) way over estimated the amount of great white sharks that exist on the coast and so those both balanced out to a way more neutral number.
I know no one cares or will read this but I just needed to write it down somewhere because this was such a wild and mind blowing experience for me. Never before have I truly experienced and utilized the sheer power and magic that is MATH to this insane degree, all thanks to Kyle. Thank you Kyle this is amazing stuff
I read it !
Theres every chance you were way off somewhere but it averaged out , more importantly you did it by yourself.
I'm into astrophotography and my wife says just Google the pics theyre way better , but that's not the point , it's doing it for yourself. I mean why go camping when you own a house, why watch sport when it's far more fun to do it yourself. Why watch a reality soap when you have your own life to live.
I have been working stuff out like this my entire life, no one ever taught me it, it just seemed a logical way to guess things. Never knew it had a name and a defined method.
You learn something new every day.
I can guesstimate within a few cents all of my grocery bills with admirable regularity. Does that count?
Yes
Yeps. It does
I think it does
Oh yeah. Definitely comes in hand with budgeting.
Yes, yes it does
"i've stood next to a large dumptruck before" **remembers the vampire's mommy video**
I am a pharmacist and use dimensional analysis all the time while working, but it applies in so many areas of life. It’s probably the single most useful mathematical tool I’ve ever learned.
My man
My mind has been corrupted. Every time I hear “dump truck” I can’t help but to think about rear ends lol
Pixar mothers :)
I'd rear-end that dump truck ;)
As a Guitarist in front of Whole Foods in Birkenstocks... I feel personally attacked...
So, because of this video, I just learned that this is how my dad taught me how to do math WAY back in elementary school... Which explains not only why I always loved math, but also why my math teachers hated me
@@AspynDotZip That is up until we start throwing people into the interstellar expanse and The Intergalactic Void.
I don’t know about anyone else, but my favorite part of each episode is the section after he says he doesn’t know what or how he’s going to fill the time as the Patreon names go by. It’s a very wonderful wrapup or behind-the-scenes moment for each episode that I really appreciate and look forward to
Kill hyle :
Advocate for the great ✨TI 89 Titanium✨ calculator
Also Kyle Hyle 14:01 :
*Procedes to use phone calculator in front of the aforementioned great ✨TI 89 Titanium✨ calculator*
I've been doing a version of this for so long but was never taught it or even knew what it was. Now that I know the process properly I feel more confident in my estimates and now it's even easier. Learning is great.
Same
I’d be interested to see a detailed breakdown of Fermi’s actual estimate from the blast
At a guess: they would know pretty much their exact distance from the blast (they were the ones designing the experiment and the safety parameters). Inverse square law for distribution of the energy, compare movement to known quantity of TNT explosion, with sanity check from previous estimates.
Edit: they would already know the maths for how suspended things move since they used rocket trails to track the shockwave on camera.
I think numberphile did a video on this before
I use this process everyday just for fun, I didn't even realize it had a name.
Lol same
Yeah, I've actually calculated the number of seconds in a year before... And how many meters per second I drive, how long it would take to walk around the world, how many generations there has been since life began.... so it was funny to see the weird stuff I subconsciously do in my head being explained as something useful
same
@@trybunt remember. It’s wasting time, unless you write it down. Then it becomes science.
Me as well
So apparently I've been using Fermi estimates all my life without knowing they had a name. Neat, I think.
It is neat that you think
@@Parodox306 - I wonder if the method was used before Fermi, whether he actually created the process or just popularized it. I’d like to believe someone like Archimedes or one of the Arab mathematicians came up with it, but sometimes the simplest solutions really do take a long time before someone envisions them.
@@queenannsrevenge100 I feel like the technique is something many people were aware of well before Fermi (look through the comments and notice how many people used it before knowing it had a name; hell, I've personally used it plenty of times before know who Fermi was), but he codified it in a way that made it more accessible. It's likely that many of the greats throughout history had similar strategies but used different language to describe the process, or just took it for granted, thinking it's what people naturally do.
@@Parodox306 I would put my money on your last guess. When I was in middle school our science teacher covered dimensional analysis for simple unit conversions, because it's a simple format, and I had the same "aha" moment the comment section is having now.
I really enjoyed watching you think through the problems that you were working on. I’m a former teacher, and I really enjoy your channel. You are a great teacher, and I’m going to recommend you to a couple of my friends who have kids who are in school. I think that they would get a lot out of watching & learning from you. Thank you for what you do.
Thank you for teaching
Hey! Fellow educator/nerd here-
I appreciate the real time problem solving / computing section of the video. It really helps build a human connection between the viewer and the host.
Keep up the great work, Kyle & team! :)
Kyle: "I've stood next to a large dump truck before."
So you're saying that Aria is thicc?
You saw the way he looked up after he said that. He knew what he was saying.
Have you seen her Twitter? She ain't just a pretty voice.
Actually, she could twist your head right off.
Video title "How to Guesstimate Like a Genius"
Uploaded: 1 minute ago
Me: I'm already 4 parallel universes ahead of you
Video title changed. I see this alot actually. Confuses me on why tho
Me after watching this video: "You know, I'm something of a mathematician myself."
When i was younger, i used to call this intuitive estimation....just imagine dimensions in your head and that's it...no numbers, no calculations, just imagine and extrapolate from the image
I didn't know this but I've been using Fermi estimates for years! It's such a convenient way to get a ballpark number. Yeah, you're never going to be close enough to get a homework problem correct but it makes for a great method to estimate weird things that come up at the bar between friends.
Kyle: Asks for Casio TI-84 sponsorship
Also Kyle: Has to use phone because his calculator is out of battery
If TI would just sponsor him then maybe he could afford some fresh batteries :)
Sounds like he should have asked for a battery sponsorship.
Thanks for this episode. I loved it when you first demonstrated this on that livestream on a channel that shall not be named but was never able to find back what it was called. This is such a great tool, you're doing the basilisk's work with content like this.
That just reminds me about the scientific method of Descartes which could theoretical solve any problem and Fermi is the dude who seem to have perfectly understood this mindset.
I mean, Descartes solution to everything was that an evil genius was trying to trick him. So I guess that is theoretically an answer to any question.
"All the units add up, multiple across the top, divide across the bottom and then BAMM!!, you just added some of that sweet sweet Spice Weasel"
I love how this is so intuitive I had no idea I was doing it. I use conservative Fermi estimation in all my budgets. ~2.5 * ~10 ~= 25. Call it 24 to be safe; And then whatever values your budget spits out are close enough but will trend downward in your favor; So I could accidentally splurge on that plushie,tangent; I love semi-colons, I had to get from Kyle but I know that I have about $500 of spare money between my Budgeted limit and my Actual limit so that extra $20 doesn't matter and I can instead focus on why my connection string closes before I can complete my write operation.
This is basically the "lemme math it out" equivalent of pulling things out of nowhere. I can get behind that.
I remember learning about this in high school. We were asked how many piano tuners there are in Chicago.
You're one of my science heroes Kyle.
I love the whole process of the equation, it literally shows one, everyone makes mistakes and two, goddamn is it hard but possible. Just takes a lot of good understanding of what it is your working with.
First time hearing or learning of Fermi calculations. Thank you.
And thank you for mention South Africa 🇿🇦
17:07 He knows our thoughts and he preemptively disapproves 😂
(Insert joke about Lady D's butt)
Huh.. Forgot that Kyle escaped the formless void.. I'm happy for him.. I fear for the world, though.
13:45 Well...... There goes that sponsorship. I'm about 90% sure of that, going by the Fermi estimate.
About 4mins late for the correct estimate
For a while (idk if it still exists) there was an event in Science Olympiad name Fermi Questions, that was basically just a bunch of random Fermi questions that you get points based on how many orders of magnitude your estimations were off. My favorite is still "How many episodes of anime could you have watched from the birth of the Sun to now?"
He estimated 10 kilotons and it was actually double. “Sir…you’re a genius!”
I absolutely adore this new method of thinking, however I really wish I could see the equation Fermi used to estimate the blast’s equivalent of TNT.
If you know how much fissile material was used, the calculation is fairly straightforward.
@@lancebradshaw4829 Do you know how much was used? If you don't, I'd love to see the calculation of how to work it out, even just as a partial equation. I don't know much about the topic but I'm really curious.
@@Ray-uf8dj Some quick research says that the core weighed 6.19 kilograms (13.6 pounds). However, it was a plutonium-gallium alloy, so I don't know how much of that was actually plutonium. Working out the maximum possible yield of a given mass of plutonium would involve looking at the difference in mass between the initial plutonium and that of the elements that are produced by the reaction (the so-called "mass defect"). The products weigh less because a small amount of the mass is converted into energy. I'll probably try to send an example calculation on your profile or something later.
I guestimate this will be a great vid!
Guestimations usually arent this pin point...
I would make Fermi proud ..
I had no idea this was called Fermi Estimation. I just kinda roll my eyes backwards into my sockets (that's not weird, you're weird) and plug some figures to estimate values like jelly beans in a jar. This was fun.
My high school physics teacher thought me to do this I was the only one in my college that knew about this so I'm glad it's being shared by someone so influential and well known
This may be the best video on UA-cam. Even before you started estimation problems in real time. Which was a really nice touch; indeed totally takes the video to a new transcendent level.
I just noticed Kyle's mustache parts like an insects mandible when he's really emphasizing words and I can't unsee it....
I'd curse you for this, but I find this to be an interesting thing to know.
He’s a tarantula.
Damnit! Now *I* can't unsee it, either! I need to stop reading comments...
"Thats definitely worthy baby~" I laughed so hard hahaha
Hey, I think he is Smart Space Dandy.
When I was a kid, my school did a "how many jelly beans are in this bottle" challenge. I used this breakdown to accurately guess the winning number within 10 beans. I felt super smart for a faith grader.
Aw, so what happened to you
Faith grader eh? Soo, a Christian school I assume.
When you showed the result of the shark estimate I wondered how you came to this conclusion, but then I actually got to 972 using only the given numbers and I have to say I`m kinda proud of myself. As always thanks for the video and keep going my favourite science communicator.
I've been doing this all my life to answer "nonsense" questions for my own amusement--I had no idea anyone else did this or that there was any validity to it! I am pleased to hear I'm in good company.
Now imma flex this divine knowledge on my classmates and teachers lol
Fermi estamation sounds like the most badass real life super power. Or the most smart ass thing in the world.
I knew there had to be a name for it!!! I've been able to do pretty "accurate guesstimates" since I learned averages and fractions, it clicked for me. I'm really happy to hear it's a thing and that I'm not just randomly pulling numbers out of my butt. I knew I subscribed to you for a reason!
Bravo for being 100% honest with those calculations.
Instead of googling it, you could do a Fermi estimation of the volume of Mount Everest by approximating it as a cone with a base length and height of 29,000 ft, which gets you a volume (via v = pi*h*b^2 / 3) of ~6.4 * 10^12 ft^3. Combining with Kyle's estimate for the volume of a dump truck, this gets a Fermi estimation of ~5 * 10^9, or 5 billion dump trucks, considerably closer to the value of 6.4 billion dump trucks listed at the end.
Haha, for the great white shark I simply said, the coast of California is about 840 miles and there's maybe 1 great white shark per mile of coastline. I got 840 great whites with only 2 guesses.
For the shark question, I did this:
Lets say the shore area is 25km from the coastline
Lets say that the coast is a 500km long, just order of magnitude
Lets say that each shark has a territory of 5x5 km
So the amount of sharks = 25×500÷(5×5)=12500÷25=500
"I have stood next to a big dump truck before" describes one of the mini trucks you see in cities not a normal one thats 2 or 3 stories tall and 3 lanes wide
And yet he was still way under.
The problem with the Drake Equation is that several of the variables are absolute unknowns (e.g. the probability of life developing on a planet). They can be anywhere from 100% to 1 out of the total number of planets in the universe (that 1 being Earth). So it's categorically a useless equation.
In the extraordinarily unlikely situation that we discover life elsewhere in the universe, that would change everything and make the equation useful as we'd then have a second instance.
That is cool. But I'd need a lot of practice.
2:47
I love conversion fractions. Some people find them annoying, I find them freeing. I even worked them into my app.
17:58
The Power of Fermi Estimates You!
Am I the only one that did this in like forever without even knowing that there is a specific term for it?!
And the best part is that today, in school, I asked a colleague to ask me a question that could be estimated and then checked on google. She asked me how many mosquitos are there. I said that each human has about one mosquito bite per night and that mosquitos only live in the summer and half of spring => 1/3 of the year so 100 days. This would mean that there are 100 mosquitos per human. But I remembered from an insect lesson a few years ago that a mosquito feeds on about 5 people so I got that there are 20 mosquitos for each human. And because there are 7.5 billion humans => there are 150 billion mosquitos. Do you want to know the actual number of mosquitos? 178 billion! Only 28 billion off!!! That’s pretty cool...!
Exactly my thoughts. Always felt this must be normal.
@@chairpara How do you know that the answer you found googling, wasn't itself fermi estimated?
@@orangus01 🤯 that’s some out of the box thinking right there
No you are not. 😅
I've heard AvE refer to a similar process as dead reckoning and it's a surprisingly usefully tool
AvE is an amazing creator and very smart and secretive.... Almost like a supervillain
In principle I like the idea as it's an analytical way to make estimates. And just as a good thought experiment to keep your mind sharp. However, I think the importance of being confident in your assumptions was very understated. It's all well and good to try to break down the problem into a series of smaller guesses and hope that the over- and underestimates will generally cancel each other out. But all it will take is for just one of those broken down guesses to be WAY off to scuttle the whole process. This is why I suspect Kyle immediately knew he shouldn't estimate the volume of Mount Everest: a mountain is just so unfathomably huge and irregularly shaped that it would be extremely difficult to do back-of-the-envelope math and be somewhat accurate with it. The chances of being extremely off the mark are just too high.
This to me is one of the big pitfalls of this method, and why I can't envision a whole lot of scenarios where the tradeoff of accuracy for speed would be worth it. Short of corner-cases like being camping in the wilderness somewhere, or having an extremely time-sensitive issue where the clock is ticking and speed is imperative. I'd rather someone just look up a few more of the figures to have a better grounded sense of the problem.
I'm also uneasy with the idea that for many of these problems - unless you're able to find an extremely relevant data source (like an actual measurement of some strange elderly Luddite's hair, or a direct sample of shark populations off the coast of California) - your "official" answer that you consult to check things is itself no more than a slightly refined case of a Fermi estimate with a more accurate foundation of broken down numbers used to calculate it. I think the "sanity check" step is another one that was not emphasized enough. People need to really think of what they might have missed and how they might be wrong. There are many of these problems where I could see there being mitigating factors that would make the real result strongly diverge from your estimate. For example, for the hair problem it doesn't account for the fact that hair grows at different speeds throughout our lives (hair growth slows as you age). Also, there's something call "terminal length" which is the length your hair stops growing at (somewhat of a misnomer as it doesn't actually stop but reaches a sort of equilibrium where hair loss and other wear and tear from damage happens fast enough that growth can't keep up with it). In the dump truck example, moving even a moderately massive amount of material, we'd have to also account for spillage, settling, and erosion from the wind/elements, among other things. Even at the scale of a major construction site I'm sure these are important factors, let alone for a hypothetical scenario involving moving an entire mountain.
I've done this my whole life, but now I have a better understanding of something I did automatically. Thank you, I love all your videos man.
This is really cool! I used the Fermi estimate and got these results:
1. 8cm/month x 12month/year x 85years/lifetime = 8160cm = 81m per lifetime. This is off by quite a lot (factor of 8)
2. I didn't even try to guess this one because I know nothing about basketball, I don't even know how many games are played each day, how many days does the competition last, and how many points the players score in one game
3. I know Everest is around 8km tall, and I've seen pictures of it so I assume it has the shape of the cone, the base is about 20km in diameter because it looks right. Then I estimate a dump truck is 5m x 3m x 3m in volume, so doing the calculations [(1/3)*8π*10^2*10^9] / (5*3*3) = 1.86*10^9 dumptrucks which is 1.86 billion dumptrucks. I'm surprised how close I got this one
I've done quite a few calculations like these my whole life. It's fun to guestimate answers like these. What I didn't know was that it's okay to be off by a factor of 2 or 3.
I always felt like this was way too much to be considered close.
At least in science that deals with big numbers, anything that lands in the same number of digits, or same order of magnitude, is extremely close. Even being off by a factor of 100 (two orders of magnitude) can be considered fairly close in some contexts.
My chem teacher taught me this, and it great. You can use it for anything.
Me: That seems too big for a dump truck
Me, later: mhmm
I was thinking the same. I think he was estimating the full size of the vehicle vs the the carrying space.
The example of canceling out units is what I would have students to to figure out crazy things. Like, “say a tree grows 5 feet in a year. How many miles per hour does it grow?”
I laughed way too hard at 5:00 because the guy who played outside my wholefoods in 2021 was actually bald. Your estimate DID hold up though XD
I feel like this is how we all think when estimating things of this nature, only we don't necessarily think about the process. I suppose we do sometimes, if we're explaining it or trying to work it out on paper, but mostly it isn't a mind blowing thing. I mean, cool video though--don't get me wrong!
You’d be surprised, a lot of people don’t estimate, they guess.
Holy crap, I think that was my question about your hair to the moon!! 😱😎👍
I had a professor in orbital mechanics who could guesstimate distances, figures, orbital times, etc. this way *without a calculator* and be within 10%-20% of the real answer. It was very impressive.
Lol, I opened this comment box to say that each TEAM plays approx 100 games/season, and as soon as I did you said "I need to go back to the basketball one" Bravo.
Also, watching you do the dimensional analysis, especially the first one with all the crossing out and readjusting, gave me flashbacks to the school days. Pretty sure all of my analyses look like your first one.
14:30 you forgot to add the # of teams in the league which is 30 you found out around how much points are scored on and by a single team every season
OH SHIT THIS DUDE FIXED IT MID VIDEO
Hahaha good shit my man i take it back