Weigh a million dollars with your mind
A million dollars is a ton of money. But how much does it weigh? Trying out a new feature: English Transcript! Let me know how it works Tweet it - http://bit.ly/so35wI Facebook it - http://on.fb...
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Suppose you're stuck on a desert island with no internet, no books, and an evil geniuswho will only let you off if you can tell him how much a million dollars weighs. Luckily,you're a physicist, so you can weigh a million dollars with your mind!Here's how it goes: we approximate. We don't know how much a dollar weighs, but we do knowhow big it is… more or less. A dollar is about 15 cm long and 5 cm wide… now howthick is it? We don't know that either, but money is made out of paper, and we do knowthat those 'Harry Potter' books were around 800 pages long, or 400 sheets of paper. AndI think they were about 5 cm thick… so that gives 80 sheets per cm.Now we can find the volume of a dollar: 15 cm long times 5...
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Suppose you're stuck on a desert island with no internet, no books, and an evil geniuswho will only let you off if you can tell him how much a million dollars weighs. Luckily,you're a physicist, so you can weigh a million dollars with your mind!Here's how it goes: we approximate. We don't know how much a dollar weighs, but we do knowhow big it is… more or less. A dollar is about 15 cm long and 5 cm wide… now howthick is it? We don't know that either, but money is made out of paper, and we do knowthat those 'Harry Potter' books were around 800 pages long, or 400 sheets of paper. AndI think they were about 5 cm thick… so that gives 80 sheets per cm.Now we can find the volume of a dollar: 15 cm long times 5...
