I'm finally getting to the calculus in physics, too! Yesterday I watched the lecture on pendulums, springs, and simple harmonic oscillation, (the one where Walter Lewin rides a pendulum across the room to show that its period is independent from mass) and today I watched the lecture about work and energy.
The SHO lecture has a little bit of calculus, mostly pretty simple and used to manipulate terms to get equations. The equations I had all seen before, last year in honors physics. However then we had just been given them, with little to no explanation of where they came from. Now that I've seen the math, I can understand the concept and reasoning behind the equations.
With work and energy calculus was deeply involved, using integrals and some manipulations to derive the equations we had again been given without explanation last year. This was then taken further when the calculus was used to understand work, energy, and gravity in three dimensions, something that had not been touched upon last year.
This is the physics that I really enjoy.
No comments:
Post a Comment