Just Google it, you can find all the solutions. The second problem is partially my fault. When I give an in-class assessment, I leave the solution out on the front desk so that students can check their answers when they are finished. Instead of studying this and figuring out their mistakes, students will usually just take a quick picture of the solutions using their phone.
Of course they ask if it's OK to take a snapshot first, and I let them. However, the problem is that they think of the solution as something to collect rather than something to learn from. Here is the most important lesson for physics students and really all students.
The learning process is difficult. If learning was easy they would call it pie as easy as pie—although I don't really understand that line. If a student is doing homework or studying and there is no struggle, there is no learning. Without confusion, the student either already understood it or never tried. This comes back to my favorite line:. Confusion is the sweat of learning. You can't just google a physics solution and expect to learn. Imagine if Luke Skywalker had access to the Internet on Dagobah.
Here's what would have happened when his x-wing sunk beneath the water. Yoda: So certain are you? Always with you what cannot be done. Skip to content Home Is physics hard to understand? Ben Davis May 31, Is physics hard to understand? Why is physics so difficult? How can I make physics easier to understand? Is physics a difficult subject? How can I be good at physics? What are the difficult topics in physics? Is biology easier than physics?
Who is the father of physics and chemistry? You should understand what a formula expresses, the physical concept e. It's often useful if you can find an everyday analogy for it e. Also, before applying a given formula you must check whether the assumptions made when deriving it are fulfilled in a given problem. Unfortunately it's not clear why despite the learning effort you seem not to perform so well at the exams.
Try studying together with other students from whom you can learn. Or try asking questions here. And try to find out where your exam answers differ from the correct answers. I don't know how helpful this group will be, we are probably a selfselected subgroup whose natural intuitions were such that physics was easy at least up until some advanced level, when the math got challenging. A lot has to do with understanding the material, and being very good at problem solving.
And I've always felt the statement about the worst teachers being those who didn't have to struggle to learn the material, has a lot of truth to it. I think being good at undrgrad level physics has a very high correlation with being good at math word problems, so if you don't get a satisfactory answer here on how to make it much easier , I'd ask the math group the same question about word problems.
The best learning technique for me when I was learning it was to speedread the chapter in the text book, then take out lots of paper and derive all the formulas just taught -the speedreading was to get the gist of where you are trying to go to and a feeling for how to get there. Also you should have mentally noted any nonobvious tricks needed to get the math to work out. Once you can do that, your understanding should be high enough to enable you to work through problems that need the understanding of the theory, but for which a cookbook like approach simply plug in equation XXX for problems of type YYY, almost never works.
If you have a really good understanding of equation XXX, how it was arrived at etc. I think the biggest thing about physics, is its mostly about a mode of thinking, and secondarily about the detailed material.
Watch how those who are good at it descibe how they solve problems, hopefully some of their thinking style can be learned. Physics is about the ability to predict the outcome of scenarios. Either with formulas, simulation, or good old curve fitting.
The underlying principles a few basic ones, but to use them you required to understand higher lever math, so to make it "easy", basic physics classes boil it down to a cookbook method.
Add one of this, two of this, mix and voila here is the result. That is not how physics supposed to be, and it is a pitty you are stuck in such a situation.
My suggestion is to bear with it, until you discover some of the commonalities by yourself and find your own way of making sense of the world. The relevant concepts involved may not have been properly explained to you in sufficient detail for you to manipulate them easily. Have you considered using a book with very clear definitions and many worked examples, like Schaum's outline series?
They get surprisingly good reviews. The way I see it, there are two aspects to the practice of science, there is a constructive one and a destructive one. Let me try to expand on that. The destructive one is the easiest to explain and usually the one on which a fair amount of time is spent. It is basically the skeptical part of science, the one where you test one idea against another. The constructive or creative aspect is the hardest part. We don't have a systematic approach to it, basically, all we do is just try.
The reason some people are more successful than others at doing this is experience, they can immediately select the potentially successful ideas from a larger set of ideas, without going through all the steps of the destructive part.
Or they just are willing to spend so much more time on working on the subject, giving up on many other activities, which of course forges experience.
Now, one might say that these two aspects are not necessarily exclusive to physics, which is true. An artist has to go through the same motions, but the criteria are different. Nature is a harsh mistress, and that's why physics is so difficult. We can come up with lots of ideas, but nature doesn't care about how creative we are, if the idea doesn't work it doesn't work. I'd say sciences in general are difficult because of this.
If you didn't encounter the problem in other sciences yet, it's because you are still at a more elementary study level in them as compared to physics. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why is Physics so hard? Asked 10 years, 11 months ago. Active 4 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 18k times.
0コメント