(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
I was googling *back of the envelope* for a recent post and I came across these lecture notes by Victor Weisskopf from 1969.
I can no longer really follow this sort of thing—I really really wish this had been my textbook back when I was studying physics. If they’d taught us this stuff, I might’ve never left that field.
Anyway, here’s one of the more accessible bits, from page 8-11 of the document, where he derives that a mountain must be less than 30 km high to be supported by the rock at its base:
In the next section, Weisskopf derives the number of atoms in a liquid from its surface tension and latent heat of evaporation:
I’m really annoyed that physics wasn’t taught this way to me. That said, it’s a challenge to write a statistics book of this sort. I’m working on it; I have various examples that have this flavor.
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