Problem Solving Made Easier

On a Monday morning in July 1945, the world's first atom bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert. Forty seconds later, the blast's shock wave reached the base camp where scientists stood in stunned contemplation. First to stir was the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi.

1945年7月的一个星期一早晨，世界上第一颗原子弹在新墨西哥沙漠爆炸了。40秒后，爆炸的冲击波到达了大本营，科学家们站在那里目瞪口呆地沉思着。第一个引起轰动的是美籍意大利物理学家恩里科·费米。

Before the detonation, Fermi had torn a sheet of notebook paper into bits. As he felt the first quiver of the shock wave, he released the shreds above his head. They fluttered down and landed about two and a half yards behind him. After a mental calculation, Fermi announced that the bomb's energy had equaled 10,000 tons of TNT. Sophisticated instruments, which took weeks to analyze the wave's velocity and pressure, confirmed Fermi's instant estimate.

在爆炸之前，费米已经把一张笔记本纸撕成碎片。当他感觉到冲击波的第一次颤动时，他把碎纸片从头顶撒下。它们飘落下来，落在他身后大约两码半的地方。经过心理计算，费米宣布核弹的能量相当于1万吨TNT炸药。复杂的仪器花费了数周时间来分析波的速度和压力，证实了费米的即时估计。

The bomb team was impressed, but not surprised. Fermi's genius was known throughout the scientific world. In 1938 he had won a Nobel Prize; four years later he produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, ushering in the nuclear age. Since Fermi's death in 1954, no physicist has been at once a master experimentalist and a leading theoretician.

炸弹小组对此印象深刻，但并不惊讶。费米的天才在科学界闻名遐迩。1938年，他获得了诺贝尔奖;四年后，他制造了第一个自我维持的核链式反应，宣告了核子时代。自从1954年费米去世以来，还没有哪位物理学家能像他一样既是实验高手又是理论大师。

Like all virtuosos, Fermi had a distinctive style. He preferred the most direct, rather than intellectually elegant, route to an answer. And he excelled at dividing difficult problems into small,manageable bites—a talent we all can use in our daily lives.

像所有的艺术大师一样，费米有自己独特的风格。他更喜欢用最直接的方式来回答问题，而不是用优雅的思维方式。他擅长将困难的问题分解易于处理的单位——这是我们在日常生活中都可以使用的一种才能。

To develop this talent in his students, Fermi would pose a type of question now known as a Fermi problem. Upon fist hearing one of these, you haven't the remotest notion of the answer, and you feel certain that too little information has been given to solve it. Yet when the problem is broken into sub-problems, each answerable without the help of experts or books, you can come remarkably close to the exact solution.

为了培养他的学生的这种天赋，费米提出了一种现在被称为费米问题的问题。当你第一次听到其中一个问题时，你对它的答案毫无概念，你肯定会觉得所提供的信息太少，无法解决它。然而，当问题被分解成子问题，每个子问题都可以在没有专家或书籍的帮助下回答时，你就

第1页下一页