It’s definitely intuition gained from a few years of doing those kinds of problems.
Also, there’s an important point that makes my intuition a bit less impressive, and it’s the fact that the problem-statement sounded like an intro-physics problem, so I assumed away many ambiguities that would make the solution particularly complicated to think through.
For example, thought it’s not specified, it matters whether your gas is in a fixed volume or not, but if you assume the gas can expand, you’re getting into solutions where you might need to know the boundary conditions at the edge of your gas, and you might need to figure out relative pressures and/or temperature gradients. Since the question doesn’t specify any of that, I guessed that it’s probably not that kind of problem.
It’s definitely intuition gained from a few years of doing those kinds of problems.
Also, there’s an important point that makes my intuition a bit less impressive, and it’s the fact that the problem-statement sounded like an intro-physics problem, so I assumed away many ambiguities that would make the solution particularly complicated to think through.
For example, thought it’s not specified, it matters whether your gas is in a fixed volume or not, but if you assume the gas can expand, you’re getting into solutions where you might need to know the boundary conditions at the edge of your gas, and you might need to figure out relative pressures and/or temperature gradients. Since the question doesn’t specify any of that, I guessed that it’s probably not that kind of problem.