How many mice would it take to fill up this classroom?

(a.k.a., making order-of-magnitude estimates for fun and profit)

Student names

Put the names of everybody in your group here!

Learning Goals (Why are we asking you to do this?)

One type of modeling is called "order-of-magnitude estimation" or "order-of-magnitude modeling." A physicist would call this a "Fermi Problem" after Enrico Fermi, a physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project and who was famously good at making estimates of this sort. More specifically, this sort of modeling makes us think about:

• The quantities that should go into our models, and the reasonable values of those quantities.
• How the different parts of our model might interact with one another.
• What a "good enough" answer would be to a particular problem

The Problem

In this project, your group is going to calculate an answer one of the following questions:

1. How many cups of coffee get consumed on MSU's campus each week?
2. How much trash is generated in the US (in cubic meters or tons) every year?
3. If somebody left one of the bathroom faucets running at the Breslin Center, how long would it take to fill it up with water?
4. How many cells are there in your body, and how does that compare to the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy?
5. How much waste is generated per mile/kilometer by a horse-drawn carriage compare to the waste generated by an automobile (answer in kg/km)?
6. If all of the hot dogs eaten in the US each year were placed end-to-end, how many times would that chain of hot dogs go around the Earth?
7. On average, how many people are airborne in the world at a given moment?
8. How many total miles do all Americans drive in their cars in one year, and how does this compare to the circumference of the Earth, the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and size of the Solar System?

As a group, pick one of these problems (each group must pick a different one!) and think about the various questions that you need to ask and answer in order to give an estimate for this problem. Figure out what equation(s) you need to write down in order to solve this problem, and the reasonable values that would go into the equation(s). Then, you're going to implement a simple computer program to calculate an answer, and do it for several possible combinations of the equations!

In the cell below, write down the parameters in your model.

Put your answer here!

Now, run your model several times, and each time change the values of the parameters to a different value in the range you think is valid. In the cell below, write down all of your answers. What is the total range, and approximately what is the average value?

Put your answer here!

Feedback on this assignment

What questions do you (or does your group) have after completing this model?

Put your answer here!

How to submit this assignment

Log into the course Desire2Learn website (d2l.msu.edu) and go to the "In-class assignments" folder. There will be a dropbox labeled "Day 3". Upload this notebook there (but not pictures of drawings, etc.). You only have to upload one notebook per group - just make sure that everybody's name is at the top of the notebook!