Lab 1: Fermi Problems and Rolling Marbles


Fermi Problems

Warm Up Exercises:
  1. Without using a calculator, convert the following to scientific notation:
    1. 24,000,000.
    2. 0.000070.
    3. Six Billion.
    4. Seven Hundred Trillion
    5. One one Thousandth.

  2. Estimate the total amount of money COA takes in each year from tuition.

  3. Estimate the number of piano tuners in Boston.

  4. (Due to Eric Mazur.) On a Saturday afternoon, you pull into a parking lot with unmetered spaces near a shopping area. You circle around, but there are no empty spots. You decide to wait at one end of the lot where you can see (and command) about 20 spaces. How long do you have to wait before someone frees up a space?


Rolling Marbles

  1. Take two meter sticks and make a track in which a ball can roll.
  2. Bend an index card and use it as a spring to launch two balls in opposite directions down the track.
  3. What happens when two identical balls are launched?
  4. What happens when two different balls are launched?
  5. What property of the balls determines how they behave when launched?
  6. Using only the ruler and the balls and the "spring", figure out how to measure this property?


Glass Beads

  1. Estimate how many glass beads will fit in one of the small plastic beakers.
  2. Fill up the beaker and then count the beads.
  3. What is the volume of the beads in the beaker? What fraction of the beaker's volume is filled by the beads?
  4. Do your answers to the above question depend on how you put the beads in the beaker?


[Dave] [Physics I] [COA]

Web page maintained by dave@hornacek.coa.edu.