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# Penny... Penny... Penny...

Whilst looking for videos to use in class I stumbled across this section of the Big Bang Theory that analogues historical physics teaching so perfectly that I had to share it. Sheldon, despite all his passion for the subject and knowledge of it's history cannot engage Penny, because she has a different set of interests and targets in mind...

# Introduction

The Drake Equation was developed by Frank Drake in 1961 as a way to focus on the factors which determine how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in our galaxy. It was originally written simply as a means to stimulate discussion in a meeting on radio astronomy, but has since been seen as a useful tool for estimating our likelihood of contacting intelliget alien civilisations. The simplest form of the Drake Equation to understand is as follows: The number of communicating civilisations in our galaxy, N, is:

$$N = S \times f_{p} \times n_{e} \times f_{l} \times f_{i} \times f_{c} \times f_{L}$$