Careful When You Wish for a Physics Class---

Dauntless

Dauntless

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----You might GET ONE!

I gave up my first semester Calculus class for the short winter session because I was able to snag a hard to get General Physics class, (NOT the little general education class.) the prerequiste for the Engineering Physics sequence. In the fall and the winter all sections filled the first day of registration, but I just keep checking and caught the waiting list when a spot opened.

Okay, Physics is too tought to learn in 6 weeks. TWICE today people commented that since I'm the one standing there explaining parts of it to groups, you'd think I'd be doing well in the class. I HAD an A for a short spell, not sure if I still have a B and we're not quite halfway.

I'm wondering if there's a Dummies book that would give it to me in a simple enough manner. If you're familiar with the Socratic Method, as in you're not really taught but you have to figure it out for your self, that's what this appears to be. (Yikes.) If the situation doesn't improve I won't get very far. The book sure doesn't seem to spell anything out.

Someone posted on Yahoo Answers one of my Webassign problems, although with different values, but the responses seem to be beyond the beginning level of the class.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080225160526AAaENaG

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The questions on that yahoo link are very easy problems .

I was very stoaked when it said unsolvable problems, as I love a good head scratcher. I was expecting particle collisions with some absurd amount of unknowns that can only be solved as an arrangement of bizzaro variables. These have more incommon with 2+2 than real physics.

If you properly solved any of them it would be an impressive feat though, and by properly solve I mean actually solving how it would move/behave, not the Newtonian model approximations your teacher wants to see.
 
liveforphysics said:
The questions on that yahoo link are very easy problems .

I was very stoaked when it said unsolvable problems, as I love a good head scratcher. I was expecting particle collisions with some absurd amount of unknowns that can only be solved as an arrangement of bizzaro variables. These have more incommon with 2+2 than real physics.

If you properly solved any of them it would be an impressive feat though, and by properly solve I mean actually solving how it would move/behave, not the Newtonian model approximations your teacher wants to see.
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So you really *do* live for physics...
 
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Yeah. And his is a cynical, jaded life. It all starts with a Thales-like rejection of all the OTHER explanations, moving on to a choice between Plato and his Ontology or Democritus and his atoms. ATOMS. I mean, not that anyone has ever SEEN them, but but do you really want to give up all this kewl theory of Protons and Electrons and burn his books as Plato wanted?

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It's a tough life living for physics. Determinism, Indeterminism, who could decide? All the while, needing new thrills, new highs. The nagging suspicion that YOU and ONLY YOU are intended to solve P versus NP, but what you CAN'T solve in Polynomial time why should you believe you could VERIFY in it? What if it's equal? What if it's NOT??

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So you can see where Willie Nelson started off to write this song about 'Mommas--don't let your babies grow up to be--Physiscists. . . .'

“[T]he present quantum theory… reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought.”
- Albert Einstein, from a letter to Daniel M. Lipkin, July 5, 1952
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If any of you think you have something to confuse the matter further, jump right in. I'm Dying to see what the Moose has to say about this.

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http://blueplanettimes.com/?page_id=4116

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The Dauntless Method. A bit different from this physics solving meme, but....
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Most of the class resorted to begging for answers/hints. Endless sphere meme therapy is one option though.

I worked with Mary, a forty something women from China who taught physics at a university in China (I was told a really good one) before coming to America and somehow ending up with a student job in the tutoring lab. It was a lot of fun, because the problems were tough, by her estimation and mine, and there was a time clock to submit the answer. She told me she hated working with some of the dumb questions she was getting, which was only laziness in disguise, totally...so, when her schedule would change each week, we would schedule to work with each other as much as possible. Sometimes we would work together, but usually we would compete. It was hilarious. If I felt I was getting close to the answer, I would take off, and she would start writing faster, and leaning into the paper, giving little looks, like she might catch some quick fragment to give her the edge. The funniest was when she thought I was going to beat her to an answer, and she was so into it, leaning on the table, she totally lost balance or something, and her elbow slipped off the table and she started falling off of the chair. Everyone thought we were weird. But, so much fun.

For a while, she was a guest professor in math at BSU, before getting a job in an insurance company, lucrative enough to force her husband to give up his tenure track. So, face-planting for physics can lead to good things.
 
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