Introduction
- Author:
- Timo Budarz
![[url=https://pixabay.com/en/albert-einstein-1921-portrait-1165151/]"Albert Einstein lecturing"[/url] in Public Domain, [url=http://pixabay.com/]pixabay[/url]](https://www.geogebra.org/resource/nRkGpmtE/78ApEYTioyhjJv70/material-nRkGpmtE.png)
Physics is the most fundamental of the sciences. The science of physics attempts to understand the fundamental laws that govern space, time and all that is within them. This can be a tremendously challenging undertaking, but also a very rewarding one.
Knowing physics is very different than knowing most other things. For instance, being good at playing the game show Jeopardy only requires that you store many facts in your head. Doing well in history, government or anatomy courses is much the same. When you look at much of what we do in school you'll see that the subjects are memory-intensive subjects. Knowing physics is not like this. Rather, it entails the understanding of rules and concepts, and possessing the skill of applying them to situations familiar and unfamiliar alike. In some sense, it is much like the practicing of jurisprudence (law). After all, a lawyer needs to understand the concepts of our legal system and then apply them to situations - no two of which are ever alike.
Save yourself time and frustration, and don't attempt to succeed at physics by rote memorization. Focus instead on concepts and principles. That's not to say that memorization is useless, it is just not as important in physics as it is in most other fields of study.
Why Study Physics?
The reasons why we study physics are varied, and the question can be taken in many ways. One answer is because your parents told you to. Another is that it's on your schedule as a necessary step to becoming a paycheck-earning engineer. Those are perhaps not the best reasons. A better reason is that all of engineering and technology (and really other sciences as well) boil down to an understanding of physics. We will have further discussion of this assertion many times over the course of our semesters together.
Perhaps looking at what famous physicists from the past said about why they studied physics and what motivated them is worthwhile.
Einstein is oft quoted as having said "I want to know God's thoughts - the rest are mere details." At first this looks perhaps like a proud statement, but from the following quote one gets a sense of his humility and sense of wonder: "People like you and me, though mortal, of course, like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live. What I mean is that we never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we are born."
Isaac Newton was quoted as saying something quite similar, though born centuries apart: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Richard Feynman, one of the more famous mid-twentieth-century physicists, was quoted as saying "Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?"
In the end, doing physics is tied to the wonder that mankind has of its own existence. We want to make sense of this place we call the universe in which our physical bodies dwell. I believe understanding such concepts adds to the richness of this experience we call life.
How Can We Do Physics?
That sounds like a strange question, but it is worth asking. After all the goal of understanding the essence of space, time and all that is within them sounds rather ambitious! If you ponder this for a moment, it does sound like an absurdly difficult undertaking. Many great minds have wondered about this as well.
Einstein said "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible." In other words, he was shocked that we have any ability at all to understand our world in this scientific way.
If you are a student of Darwinism, it seems all the more unlikely that creatures that we are - bent on survival by finding food, shelter and perhaps a mate - should have a propensity and capacity for abstract mathematics that lends itself to understanding the structure of the atomic nucleus or a black hole.
It is equally strange that we can use mathematics to discover such rules about space, time and all that's within them. After all, didn't we invent math? Many people who have studied this question are actually of the opinion that we discovered mathematics rather than invented it, and that it is the language of the universe.
Since this is not a course on philosophy of science, we will just leave it at this: It is both amazing and convenient that all we need is curiosity and mathematics to understand the most fundamental rules that govern our physical universe... and that's what we're going to set about doing here.