alt Hacker NewsPhysics is an endless source of frustration to me. It feels like a mix of random tricks, most of which I don’t understand.
I find math and compsci reasonably understandable, can read research papers in both fields ( and have published papers) etc. There’s something specific about physics I don’t get but I’ve never been able to figure out what. The main symptom is that most cause -> consequence in such demonstrations , which are seemingly obvious to everyone, make no sense to me.
Am I the only one ? Are there good resources to learn it?
Replies
More than twenty years ago, I quit a program that taught math/cs/physics (the notorious French "classes préparatoires") ~almost precisely over this: I felt like I was being taught physics like it was an axiomatic system where the tricks should not be questioned, they just work so "shut up and calculate" (and you don't even need to be doing quantum mechanics for that).
I just felt like we never got to the heart of the matter of why the models work and how to approach developing them, it was all about learning a bag of tricks.
Meanwhile, math and CS being a lot more axiomatic by nature, they also made a lot more sense to me.
That being said, that specificity of physics, the unbridgeable gap between reality and the models we build to describe it, in retrospect, is what makes it more interesting to me today (it's not just a "closed" system in the sense that math is — of course the relationship between math and physics is itself fascinating but that's yet another topic), but I still feel like I haven't found the right pedagogical approach to make it fit my mindset.
Same for me. I wanted to major in physics and I quickly realized that I have no intuition for physics. Math made sense to me and I went to graduate school in math and still don’t understand anything in physics. Differential geometry, no problem. Electromagnetism makes no sense to me.
Weird, I always loved physics because I felt like I didn't have to straight up memorize everything. In a pinch (years ago) I felt like I was able to pretty much derive everything I needed if I couldn't remember the exact formulas. It's all just forces and vectors.
I identify with this perfectly. (I mean, was able to get by in physics but it never crystallized into intuition for me the way math and CS do.)
Physics? Yes. Feynman Lectures On Physics and Computation. Landau & Lifshitz. If you like SICP you might like SICM. Nielsen & Chuang's Quantum Computation and Quantum Information then Faulkner's Modern Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Information
General advice take a look at the references in works you've recently read and look for lower level topics that interest you, after repeating a few times you'll find your way to physics or chemistry and you can use the above as reference works. The best resource is the one you actually use. If https://www.youtube.com/learning works better for you then use it.
What's the problem exactly? Could you not follow the example in the text?
The standard text to build understanding in physics is University Physics by Sears & Zemansky.
It's worth remembering you're quite far from the ground in physics, and it's mostly taught with "neat" cases that give insight into physics. I.e. the thought experiment to show why kinetic energy must scale quadratically with velocity is carefully designed to show that conclusion. You shouldn't expect to have come up with it off the cuff.
It seems that we're exact opposites! But if mathematics is your thing, it might be interesting for you to explore trying to learn things from a lagrangian perspective first?
Not sure if it'll help you with gaining an intuitive understanding, but at least it'll be interesting!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_mechanics