Of Bombs and Boats and Mice and Men: A Random Tour Through Some Scaling Laws

摘要

I will begin with a true story which has become semimythical. Shortly after World War Two, the US Atomic Energy Commission released a film of the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb test. The energy yield remained secret, having been estimated only with some difficulty. So the Americans were most surprised when the British fluid dynamicist Geoffrey Taylor published, in 1950, an accurate estimate merely by studying the AEC's pictures [1,2]. Embellishments of the tale have the Americans wondering how on Earth he did it, with the CIA visiting his house in the middle of the night to search through his papers.