Alt text:
‘At the stroke of midnight, your brother will be hurtling sideways at an altitude of 150 meters’ is a regular physics prediction about your nonmagical trebuchet, whereas ‘you are cursed to build a brother-launching trebuchet’ falls out of the Lagrangian.
You must log in or register to comment.
Sadly a lot of math heavy textbooks love to present the equations and how to use them, but do a poor job explaining how those equations came to be.
You should pick up some civil engineering books. I did 1 year before I realized I hated it, but they’re full of lovely equation that are like [Size of sand grains] x [percentage of empty space filled with water] x ([speed of water flow] + 14) x [Bill Factor]
(We add 14 to prevent the formula from breaking down)
(The Bill Factor was created by Bill Johnson and is 3.11 when it’s raining and 1.70 when it’s not. It is based on practical observations and has no theoretical basis)
There is also the whole formula set that adequately describes the phenomenon. It is a three dimensional set of differential equations, where you can only ever know five out of six starting conditions, so you need to iteratively adjust the sixth one until your error term is small enough. The formula set was developed 80 years after Johnsons proposal, using the advancements in computing technology, but the results are not better than what we get with the Bill Factor
So we thank Bill Johnson every day we use his Factor.
Or why you’d want to use them.
I had to do a semester of learning how to deal with Fourier Transforms, with vague mentions of sine waves and slopes, before seeing Technology Connections’ video on CDs and finally understanding what all that math was actually for.
I have some sort of learning disability when it comes to math. I barely passed math classes in high school. I had one required math class in college, took the “anyone can pass this class” one and still got a C.
So basically, once math is involved, it’s all magic to me.
Hooray
magicscience!There is a real good argument to be made that math is a language.
So you didn’t fail math you are just illiterate. Not really sure if that is better though…
I felt the same way until I had to take a statistics class for a second bachelors I’m working on as a middle aged person. The class was “statistics for non STEM majors” and the extremely chill, aging surfer dude prof approached it like we were all easily spooked horses and math was a snake.
He didn’t even tell us when we took our midterm, he told us it was a quiz that he was offering lots of extra tutoring sessions for. He didn’t tell us until weeks later when someone asked when the midterm would be. He really went out of his way to explain down to the roots of each equation about how and why it works.
By the end of it I didn’t feel like I was missing the part of my brain that can do math anymore.
Biology bs required 5 units of physics, physics was 3+1 for the lab. I haaaaate physics, love my chemistry, I’m pretty bad at higher math, physics just tries to be as tricky as possible while hiding behind the shroud of “this is how it works in life”. They made a "physics for biologists"class which was as much practical application of physics as they could put into a 1 unit 1 night per week course. I learned more, better, talking point physics in that class than any other.
Finals week was an optional “sasquatch” lecture that was open to anyone we wanted to bring, it was attended by more people than were actually in the class.
We learned how drag coefficients worked, how a great white child swim from California to Japan in 1 bite of food, how a blue whale and a bacteria both use the same amount of energy to move a distance. How terminal velocity means you can’t drop a mouse to it’s death. The optics of eyes… greatest physics course ever.
