This week's Lower Sixth homework asks students to estimate the resistance of the lightning conductor on Wigton church. Here's the one at Cockermouth. If you enlarge the first picture you can see it snaking up the right hand side of the tower. The second view, from the bottom of the tower, shows how it then heads down to disappear into the Earth. To estimate the resistance, we need the dimensions of the conducting strip. So how wide and deep do you think it is? And looking at the spire, how many metres tall would you say that the building is? Good estimation skills are important in physics and engineering. I usually start by imagining how many people stacked on top of each other would reach the top, and work to an over-estimate that the people are two metres tall...
This week's Lower Sixth homework asks students to estimate the resistance of the lightning conductor on Wigton church. Here's the one at Cockermouth. If you enlarge the first picture you can see it snaking up the right hand side of the tower. The second view, from the bottom of the tower, shows how it then heads down to disappear into the Earth. To estimate the resistance, we need the dimensions of the conducting strip. So how wide and deep do you think it is? And looking at the spire, how many metres tall would you say that the building is? Good estimation skills are important in physics and engineering. I usually start by imagining how many people stacked on top of each other would reach the top, and work to an over-estimate that the people are two metres tall...