Introduction: Being a freshman in honors physics is kind of unthinkable to the average mind. Heck, even for the intelligent mind honors physics is difficult. Most of the people in my class who were regarded as smart in middle school are having trouble in this class. The question you, the reader, may be asking is this: What is so hard about physics? Dear reader, that question is what this post is going to answer. And so, without further ado, my personal challenge of honors physics:
The reason physics is hard for me is because physics just isn’t straightforward. In middle school, your average equation might consist of multiple variables, some of which are given to you and some of which you have to solve for. For example, y = mx + b, one of the many forms of the equation of a line. Let’s say that you have to solve for b. You are given that y = 2, x= 6, and m=-4. You would solve the equation using steps:
2 = -4(6) + b
2 = -24 + b
26 = b.
Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? However, in a physics problem, it normally just isn’t that easy. For example, take problem number 15 on page 39 in the physics textbook: “A bowling ball traveling with constant speed hits the pins at the end of a bowling lane 16.5 meters long. The bowler hears the sounds of the ball hitting the pins 2.5 seconds after the ball is released from his hands. What is the speed of the ball? The speed of sound is 340 m/s.” So you have displacement (16.5m), time (2.5s), and you’re trying to find velocity. Wouldn’t you use the equation d = vt and solve it like this?
16.5 = 2.5v
6.6 m/s = v
No, that answer is wrong. Why, you ask? It’s because you forgot about the amount of time that the sound took to reach you after the ball hit the pins. So now you have to solve for that using the equation of d = vt, but instead of factoring in the time you know you have to factor in the speed of sound and leave t as a variable:
16.5 = 340t
.0485s = t
Now that you have the time the sound took to reach you after the bowling ball hit the pins, you subtract that from the total time:
2.5 – .0485 = t
2.451 = t
Now that you have the time that it took for the bowling ball to reach the pins, now you can solve for v using d = vt:
16.5 = 2.451v
6.73 m/s = v
Conclusion: Since I have laid it out for you, it may not seem as hard as you might expect. You might be saying, “Well, that’s not as difficult as you made it out to be! You managed to solve it pretty easily!” Well, that’s actually not the case at all. I have tried on multiple occasions to solve that problem and ended up with the wrong answer so many times that it’s unbelievable because I am not used to not having the work laid out in front of me. I was confused as to what the speed of sound’s purpose was in the problem and tried to solve the equation with just one step using only the information given. Now that I’m a little more experienced in physics the main lesson to be learned from doing physics problems is that nothing is just flat-out given to you; you have to solve for multiple variables to get the right answer using the information known, which for the most part is not that much. You have to figure out what doesn’t belong in specific equations and what does, what number matches with each variable, and even which equation to use for each problem. The example I demonstrated is the easiest I could find to demonstrate my point. I could have used something much harder, like (in the textbook) problem 45, 46, 47, and others. My main challenge with physics is that I’m not used to the method of solving the problems due to being used to having all the information needed in front of me, and is something that I will most definitely have to get adjusted to.
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