I read about Panasonic’s proposed lithium-ion battery this morning. This afternoon Rhett Allain mused idly: “I wonder if I can estimate how big this battery would be.” He then pulled out his unit conversion stick and gave the problem a merciless thrashing, sketching out his estimates, describing possible sources of error, and arriving at the conclusion: “This isn’t too bad – like the volume of a small refrigerator.”

I’ll underscore this until I tear the page:

Rhett eats, breathes, and sleeps his stuff. Physics is on his mind all the time, humming away somewhere at some low frequency. And whenever physics floats by, Rhett knows how to bring it down, stuff it with a concise question, and mount it – on the wall of his blog, certainly, and presumably also in his classroom. He makes this look way too easy.