Fermi Answer Today

You probably remember the part of the chorus: "ain't no lie, baby bye, bye, bye, (bye, bye)." That repeats twice per chorus. Pop choruses often repeat 4 times, so 40 should be close.

"Baby bye, bye, bye, (bye, bye)"

5

Twice per chorus

× 2

Choruses

× 4

5 × 2 × 4

≈ 40

We have to guess the size of a Submariner and one of Big Ben's faces. The Submariner is easy since it's a watch and you can use your wrist as reference: it's around a couple inches. The face of Big Ben is harder, and probably bigger than it looks. Maybe 20 feet?

Big Ben's face

~20 ft = 240 in

Submariner, across

~2 in

240 ÷ 2

≈ 120

We have to guess the size of a Submariner and one of Big Ben's faces. The Submariner is easy since it's a watch and you can use your wrist as reference: it's around 5 centimeters. The face of Big Ben is harder, and probably bigger than it looks. Maybe 6 meters?

Big Ben's face

~6 m = 600 cm

Submariner, across

~5 cm

600 ÷ 5

≈ 120

This question comes down to: on average, how many pairs of socks does a person go through in a year? Let's go with eight pairs. That's 64 billion pairs of socks (eight pairs times eight billion people). Divided by three you get just over 20 billion.

People on Earth

8,000,000,000

Pairs per person a year

× 8

A third of the world's socks

÷ 3

64B ÷ 3

≈ 21,000,000,000