Enrico Fermi — "Never make anything more accurate than it needs to be."
Never make anything more accurate than it needs to be.
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More from Enrico Fermi
"Young man, I am not trying to shake your faith in God, but in the physicists."
"The first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."
"The world is full of interesting things to do with neutrons."
"The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives."
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The quote advocates matching precision to actual requirements rather than chasing unnecessary exactness. Over-engineering accuracy wastes time, resources, and effort without improving outcomes. A rough answer that solves the problem is better than a perfect answer that arrives too late or costs too much. Know when close enough is genuinely sufficient — then stop refining and act. Practical precision, not perfectionism, drives real progress.
Relevance to Enrico Fermi
Fermi pioneered Fermi estimation — rapid back-of-envelope calculations yielding surprisingly reliable order-of-magnitude answers. He famously estimated the Trinity atomic bomb's yield by dropping scraps of paper during the blast. At Chicago Pile-1, he used practical calculations rather than theoretical perfection to achieve the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. His entire career demonstrated that knowing when to stop refining separates productive scientists from paralyzed perfectionists.
The era
During Fermi's most productive years — the 1930s through early 1950s — scientists worked without computers, relying on slide rules and mental arithmetic. The Manhattan Project demanded both speed and sufficient accuracy to build functional weapons under wartime pressure. Post-war nuclear physics faced Cold War urgency where approximate answers enabling timely decisions outweighed perfectly calculated ones that arrived too late. Pragmatism over perfectionism was a survival strategy.
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