Scales, Dimensions, Measures
DRAFT - WORK IN PROGRES …
Popular readings on physical scales, estimates, orders of magnitude
Geoff Cottrell - Matter. A Very Short Introduction (OUP VSI)
Gerard t’Hooft, Stefan Vandoren - Time in Powers of Ten. Natural Phenomena and Their Timescales (2014)
Philip Morrison, Phylis Morrison,Charles and Ray Eames - Powers of Ten: a Book About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero (1984)
Cumrun Vafa - Puzzles to Decipher the World. Physics and Mathematics from Newton to Strings (2022)
Lawrence Weinstein, John A. Adam - Guesstimation. Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin (2008) trad.it. more or less how much? The art of making estimates about the world
Lawrence Weinstein, Patricia Edwards - Guesstimation 2.0. Solving Today’s Problems on the Back of a Napkin Press (2012)
Rob Eastaway - Maths on the Back of an Envelope. Clever ways to (roughly) calculate anything (2019)
Piero Martin - The 7 Measures of the World (2021)
Andrew C. A. Elliott - Is this number big? To understand when a number should scare or excite us - 2021
Vaclav Smil - Numbers Don’t Lie. Short Stories for Understanding the World - 2023
Insights into estimation and dimensional analysis
- Anthony Zee - Fly by Night Physics: How Physicists Use the Backs of Envelopes
- Sanjoy Mahajan - The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering. Mastering Complexity (2014)
- Sanjoy Mahajan - Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving (2010)
- Don S. Lemons - A Student s Guide to Dimensional Analysis
- John N. Shive, Robert L. Weber - Similarities in Physics (1982)
- L.I. Sedov - Similarity and Dimensional Methods in Mechanics
- Eleftherios N. Economou - From Quarks to the Universe. a short physics course. 2nd ed. (2019)
Resources Online
- Sanjoy Mahajan,Peter Goldreich,Sterl Phinney - Order-of-Magnitude Physics. Understanding the World with Dimensional Analysis, Educated Guesswork, and White Lies Online: Order of Magnitude Physics http://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/oom/
Analysis of experimental errors
- Lino Miramonti, Laura Perini, Ivan Veronese - Analysis of experimental laboratory errors - 2009
- John R. Taylor - Introduction To Error Analysis: The Study of Uncertainties in Physical Measurements transl.it. Introduction to error analysis
- Philip Bevington, D. Keith Robinson - Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences
Analysis of calculation errors and rounding
- Rubin H. Landau, Manuel J. Paez, Cristian C. Bordeianu - Computational Physics
- Forman S. Acton - Real Computing Made Real
- Nicholas J. Higham - Accuracy and Stability of Numerical Algorithms, 2nd ed (2002)