11．Fermi Problem 費米問題
On a Monday morning in July, the world\'s first atom bomb exploded in New Mexico desert. Forty seconds later, the shock waves reached the base camp where the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi and his team stood. After a mental calculation, Fermi announced to his team that the bomb's energy had equated 10,000 tons of TNT. The bomb team was impressed, but not surprised. Fermi's genius was known throughout the scientific world. In 1938 he had won a Nobel Prize. Four years later he produced the first nuclear chain reaction, leading us into the nuclear age. Since Fermi's death in 1954, no physicist has been at once a master experimentalist and a leading theoretician.
Like all virtuosos, Fermi had a distinctive style. He preferred the most direct route to an answer. He was very good at dividing difficult problems into small, manageable bits — talent we all can use in our daily lives.
To develop this talent in his students, Fermi would suggest a type of question now known as a Fermi problem. Upon first hearing one of these, you haven\'t the remotest notion of the answer, and you feel certain that too little information had been given to solve it. Yet when the problem is broken into sub-problems, each answerable without the help of experts or books, you can come close to the exact solution.
Suppose you want to determine earth\'s circumference without looking it up. Everyone knows that New York and Los Angeles are about 3,000 miles apart and that the time difference between them is three hours. There hours is one-eighth of a day, and a day is the time it takes the planet to complete one rotation, so its circumference must be times 3,000 or 24,000 miles. This answer differs from the true value, 24,902.45 miles, by less than four percent.
Ultimately the value of dealing with everyday problems the way Fermi did lies in the rewards of making independent discoveries and inventions. It doesn't matter whether the discovery is as important as determining the power of an atom or as small as measuring the distance between New York and Los Angeles. Looking up the answer, or letting someone else find it, deprives you of the pleasure and pride that accompany creativity, and deprives you of an experience that builds up self-confidence. Thus, approaching personal dilemmas as Fermi problems can become a habit that enriches your life.
7月的一個星期一早上，世界上第一顆原子彈在新墨西哥沙漠上爆炸了。40秒鐘以后，這個震動波傳到了美籍意大利人、物理學(xué)家恩里科·費米和他的隊員們所駐扎的基地。經(jīng)過大腦計算，費米向他的隊員們宣布爆炸的原子彈的能量相當于1萬噸烈性炸藥。費米的話給隊員們留下深刻的印象，但他們并不驚奇。費米的天才聞名于整個科學(xué)界。他在1938年就已獲得諾貝爾獎。四年之后，他創(chuàng)造了第一次原子核的鏈反應(yīng)，帶領(lǐng)我們進入了原子時代。自1954年費米去世后，還沒有哪一位物理學(xué)家同時是一名精通的實驗主義者和一名最主要的理論家。
像所有的藝術(shù)家一樣，費米有他自己的獨特風(fēng)格。他喜歡用最直接的路徑去解決問題。他非常善于把困難問題分解成小的可以解決的小部分——這種能力我們在日常生活中都可以使用。
為了開發(fā)他的學(xué)生們的才能，費米會提出一種現(xiàn)在稱之為費米問題的問題。當你聽到這樣一個問題時，你對問題的答案絲毫都不知道，你肯定會認為所提供的信息太少了，因而無法解決它。但是當這個問題被分解為幾個次級問題，每個問題不用求教專家或書本都能解答時，你就接近于得到準確的答案。
假設(shè)你想不通過查閱而確定地球周長。每個人都知道紐約離洛杉磯大約3 000英里遠，且兩地的時區(qū)差為3小時。3小時是一天的1／8，一天剛好是地球完成一次公轉(zhuǎn)的時間。所以它的周長肯定是3 000英里的八倍，即24 000英里。這個答案與真正的地球周長值24 902.45英里只相差不足4%。
最后，以費米處理問題的方式解決日常問題的價值在于獨立發(fā)現(xiàn)和發(fā)明的回報。這個發(fā)明是否像確定一顆原子的能那樣重要還是像度量紐約和洛杉磯之間的距離那樣細小都沒有關(guān)系。查找這個答案，或是讓其他人去發(fā)現(xiàn)它，都是剝奪你隨創(chuàng)造而來的歡樂與自豪，剝奪了你建立自信心的一次經(jīng)歷。所以，用費米問題解決個人困境能形成一種使你的生活豐富多彩的好習(xí)慣。
★1).Fermi’s team was impressed by Fermi’s announcement in the base camp because he could even work out the power of the atom bomb in his mind.-R
★2).Fermi, an experimentalist as well as a theoretician, won a Nobel Prize for producing the first nuclear chain reaction in the world.-W
★3).Dividing a big problem into small problems is a talent Fermi had and a talent that has practical value in life.-R
★4).Fermi problem is to develop the talent of breaking a seemingly unanswerable problem into sub-problems and finding the solution to it, which is a typical Fermi problem.-R
★5).Then the fourth paragraph tells us how Fermi solved the problem of earth’s circumference without looking up.-W
★6).The last paragraph concludes the whole writing by stressing the value of important inventions and small discoveries.-W
★7).Fermi was famous for inventing a device to calculate bomb’s energy accurately.-N
On a Monday morning in July, the world\'s first atom bomb exploded in New Mexico desert. Forty seconds later, the shock waves reached the base camp where the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi and his team stood. After a mental calculation, Fermi announced to his team that the bomb's energy had equated 10,000 tons of TNT. The bomb team was impressed, but not surprised. Fermi's genius was known throughout the scientific world. In 1938 he had won a Nobel Prize. Four years later he produced the first nuclear chain reaction, leading us into the nuclear age. Since Fermi's death in 1954, no physicist has been at once a master experimentalist and a leading theoretician.
Like all virtuosos, Fermi had a distinctive style. He preferred the most direct route to an answer. He was very good at dividing difficult problems into small, manageable bits — talent we all can use in our daily lives.
To develop this talent in his students, Fermi would suggest a type of question now known as a Fermi problem. Upon first hearing one of these, you haven\'t the remotest notion of the answer, and you feel certain that too little information had been given to solve it. Yet when the problem is broken into sub-problems, each answerable without the help of experts or books, you can come close to the exact solution.
Suppose you want to determine earth\'s circumference without looking it up. Everyone knows that New York and Los Angeles are about 3,000 miles apart and that the time difference between them is three hours. There hours is one-eighth of a day, and a day is the time it takes the planet to complete one rotation, so its circumference must be times 3,000 or 24,000 miles. This answer differs from the true value, 24,902.45 miles, by less than four percent.
Ultimately the value of dealing with everyday problems the way Fermi did lies in the rewards of making independent discoveries and inventions. It doesn't matter whether the discovery is as important as determining the power of an atom or as small as measuring the distance between New York and Los Angeles. Looking up the answer, or letting someone else find it, deprives you of the pleasure and pride that accompany creativity, and deprives you of an experience that builds up self-confidence. Thus, approaching personal dilemmas as Fermi problems can become a habit that enriches your life.
7月的一個星期一早上，世界上第一顆原子彈在新墨西哥沙漠上爆炸了。40秒鐘以后，這個震動波傳到了美籍意大利人、物理學(xué)家恩里科·費米和他的隊員們所駐扎的基地。經(jīng)過大腦計算，費米向他的隊員們宣布爆炸的原子彈的能量相當于1萬噸烈性炸藥。費米的話給隊員們留下深刻的印象，但他們并不驚奇。費米的天才聞名于整個科學(xué)界。他在1938年就已獲得諾貝爾獎。四年之后，他創(chuàng)造了第一次原子核的鏈反應(yīng)，帶領(lǐng)我們進入了原子時代。自1954年費米去世后，還沒有哪一位物理學(xué)家同時是一名精通的實驗主義者和一名最主要的理論家。
像所有的藝術(shù)家一樣，費米有他自己的獨特風(fēng)格。他喜歡用最直接的路徑去解決問題。他非常善于把困難問題分解成小的可以解決的小部分——這種能力我們在日常生活中都可以使用。
為了開發(fā)他的學(xué)生們的才能，費米會提出一種現(xiàn)在稱之為費米問題的問題。當你聽到這樣一個問題時，你對問題的答案絲毫都不知道，你肯定會認為所提供的信息太少了，因而無法解決它。但是當這個問題被分解為幾個次級問題，每個問題不用求教專家或書本都能解答時，你就接近于得到準確的答案。
假設(shè)你想不通過查閱而確定地球周長。每個人都知道紐約離洛杉磯大約3 000英里遠，且兩地的時區(qū)差為3小時。3小時是一天的1／8，一天剛好是地球完成一次公轉(zhuǎn)的時間。所以它的周長肯定是3 000英里的八倍，即24 000英里。這個答案與真正的地球周長值24 902.45英里只相差不足4%。
最后，以費米處理問題的方式解決日常問題的價值在于獨立發(fā)現(xiàn)和發(fā)明的回報。這個發(fā)明是否像確定一顆原子的能那樣重要還是像度量紐約和洛杉磯之間的距離那樣細小都沒有關(guān)系。查找這個答案，或是讓其他人去發(fā)現(xiàn)它，都是剝奪你隨創(chuàng)造而來的歡樂與自豪，剝奪了你建立自信心的一次經(jīng)歷。所以，用費米問題解決個人困境能形成一種使你的生活豐富多彩的好習(xí)慣。
★1).Fermi’s team was impressed by Fermi’s announcement in the base camp because he could even work out the power of the atom bomb in his mind.-R
★2).Fermi, an experimentalist as well as a theoretician, won a Nobel Prize for producing the first nuclear chain reaction in the world.-W
★3).Dividing a big problem into small problems is a talent Fermi had and a talent that has practical value in life.-R
★4).Fermi problem is to develop the talent of breaking a seemingly unanswerable problem into sub-problems and finding the solution to it, which is a typical Fermi problem.-R
★5).Then the fourth paragraph tells us how Fermi solved the problem of earth’s circumference without looking up.-W
★6).The last paragraph concludes the whole writing by stressing the value of important inventions and small discoveries.-W
★7).Fermi was famous for inventing a device to calculate bomb’s energy accurately.-N