Speaker:Dr Colm-cille Caulfield (DAMTP)
Venue: Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College
Time: 26/10/2009 20:30, drinks from 20:15

Mathematics is the language that describes the natural world, but it is sometimes a bit hard to read the handwriting. In this talk, I will introduce the concept of ‘dimensional analysis’ as a very powerful tool for understanding the key quantities of interest in a range of physical situations. A particularly famous and appropriate example is the accurate estimation of the (classified) yield of the Trinity nuclear test by the Trinity mathematician G. I. Taylor using (declassified) photographs. I will also discuss some closely related techniques for the identification of ‘similarity solutions’ which often manage to capture the important features of a physical system with surprisingly little mathematical heavy lifting.