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Fermi was an inveterate experimentalist, always trying to measure and test things. Hence the idea of the Fermi estimate. There's a good piece about him here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n10/steven-shapin/think-... >Fermi saw the Trinity Test as an opportunity for one of his famous exercises of rational estimation, a Fermi problem. First, he offered to take wagers from other scientists on whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, destroying New Mexico or even the entire world. Then, the evening before, he carefully prepared an experiment to estimate the bomb’s explosive yield: > "About forty seconds after the explosion the air blast reached me, I tried to estimate its strength by dropping from about six feet small pieces of paper before, during and after the passage of the blast wave. Since, at the time, there was no wind, I could observe very distinctly and actually measure the displacement of the pieces of paper that were in the process of falling while the blast was passing. The shift was about 2.5 metres, which, at the time, I estimated to correspond to a blast that would be produced by ten thousand tons of TNT." > "He was so profoundly and totally absorbed in his bits of paper," his wife recorded, "that he was not aware of the tremendous noise." The answer later calculated by the instrumentation specialists was 18 kilotons, but Fermi’s answer was arrived at on the spot – and it was correct within an order of magnitude. |
Of course if you bet on the bomb not causing the end of the world, you can only win.