Notebooks

Dimensional Analysis

Dimensional analysis provides a powerful and unambiguous way of querying (and ultimately answering) someone who blithely says, "oh, that effect is small and negligible". As I tell students, to be meaningful and robust, the correct retort to such statements is "small compared to what?".—McKinley

Recommended

McKinley, G. H. (2024). Getting the (dimensionless) numbers right. Nature Chemical Engineering, 1(1), Article 1.
Morin, D. J. (2008). Introduction to classical mechanics: With problems and solutions. Cambridge university press.
Chapter 1 contains a short but useful discussion.
Lemons, D. S. (2017). A Student’s Guide to Dimensional Analysis (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Anything Lemons writes is well-written; this is not an exception.