Andrew Fildes wrote:
> Makes me glad I never did Physics - I'd have ended up as uncertain as you.
>
I was a pretty serious science nut in my youth. At that time, they
didn't teach differential calculus in High School in the US, although
they probably do now. Physics majors didn't take a physics course until
their second semester, after they had Math 1A under their belts. So what
I took was the first two years of physics for majors at a Uni rife with
Nobel Prize physicists and some honors chem.
Then two things happened:
- I figured out that all the stuff they'd fed me through my childhood
about how Science was just about to figure everything out and "save the
world" was complete BS.
- I started to realize that my until then excellent abilities were based
on the ability to visualize the problem in my head. that would then lead
me toward solutions. But I was hitting the limits of that ability.
So I wandered elsewhere, lost for decades, until I washed up on the
shores of the Oly list. :-)
I though for years that the visualization thing had been some sort of
cheating, or something, and that real physicists worked it all out on
paper. So I was very pleased when I found out that Richard Feynman, the
Nobel Prize winner in Quantum Mechanics and famous teacher said that was
how all his discoveries were made. He visualized it in his head first,
then figured out how to do the math to show it to others and experiments
to verify it.
Moose
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|