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 –Â on the wall of his blog, certainly, and presumably also in his classroom. He makes this look way too easy.
4 Comments
rhett
December 30, 2009 - 6:45 am -Dan,
You really shouldn’t do this. I will get a big head. Then I will be impossible to deal with.
I do like physics though.
twisteduo
December 30, 2009 - 8:08 am -i know rhett. Yes he is already impossible to deal with and physics are indeed on his mind constantly. A close second is blogs.
monika hardy
December 30, 2009 - 10:05 am -Don’t laugh – but i just saw Cliff Stoll’s Ted Talk on Everything,.. and actually wondered to myself… is Rhett like this?…ever?…
Huge bravo to the man – Rhett.
KD
January 5, 2010 - 5:07 pm -Wow, pretty cool stuff. (I like your name by the way). I wish more teachers were like this. Hands on material and teachers actually excited about the subject they teach is most definitely what we need in education today. There are way too may teachers who simply teach for the sake of it and don’t reach many students. I teacher like Rhett here seems to be very hands on and quite fun