"The Effects of Nuclear Weapons"

I got a blast out of my copy.

(Peter Stickney) wrote in message

Naw - if it's really good, you toss a bit of grass/paper in the air
when you see the flash, measure its displacement when the shock hits
by eye, and do it in your head. While keeping ahead of the crowd, as
in "If you see me running, try to keep up."

(Worked for Ed Teller at Alamagordo. And not only was he faster than
the Data Reduction folks with all their slide rules & Analyzers, he
was more accurate, as well.)

As others have said...it was Fermi, and problems like this became
known as Fermip problems. See, for example
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionar...rmi%20question

-stmx3

In article ,
(stmx3) writes:
(Peter Stickney) wrote in message

Naw - if it's really good, you toss a bit of grass/paper in the air
when you see the flash, measure its displacement when the shock hits
by eye, and do it in your head. While keeping ahead of the crowd, as
in "If you see me running, try to keep up."

(Worked for Ed Teller at Alamagordo. And not only was he faster than
the Data Reduction folks with all their slide rules & Analyzers, he
was more accurate, as well.)

As others have said...it was Fermi, and problems like this became
known as Fermip problems. See, for example
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionar...rmi%20question

Quite right. My misstatement. I plead Lack of Caffeine.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

Pat Flannery wrote in message ...
James Nicoll wrote:

Unless you have one like mine, which comes with the Nuclear
Effects circular slide rule in the back pocket.


...and I assume you immediately did what I did; crank it all the way to
the top (20 megatons, IIRC) and set the burst height at zero to see just
how big of a crater you could make. What was that again? Around 400 feet
deep?

Pat

I don't know about the 400 feet, but, IIRC, there was a diagram on the
front showing scaling factors for shallow and deep sub-surface bursts
if cratering is what you fancy.