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A comment on Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar. Parent comment

Re:Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar by Osmium on Monday December 01, 2014 @07:14AM (#8680561)
> here we have to assume that the black hole is not rotating very fast

I read that, for Interstellar, it's actually very important to include rotation of the black hole: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/09/interste...

> which offer great 'Fermi problems'

An aside, but I'm curious. I see this mentioned a lot more often lately, and I know Randall Monroe talks about them a lot in his 'What if?' series, so I'm not sure if it's because of that popularising the term, or if it's just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon on my part. A Google Trends search suggests increased interest, but it could just be coincidental.

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Re:Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar by ThePhysicist on Monday December 01, 2014 @09:06AM (#8680969)
Fermi problems are discussed a lot in Physics, and as a working physicist you always need to be able to quickly estimate the order of magnitude of something when developing ideas for experiments, since calculating everything in detail is usually too time-consuming. So I'd say that this is not a hype but rather a pretty useful skill for any scientist.
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