Physics!

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. 

Physics

I ended up watching two physics lectures today, starting one between school and work, and then finishing it and another after getting home from practice.

The first was on 3d Kinetics, and free fall reference frames. It was pretty much all stuff I had encountered in honors physics last year, but Prof. Lewin never fails to make it interesting and fun to watch and learn about.

The second lecture was on circular motion. Again, it was mostly stuff I'd encountered before, though taught slightly differently. Also, as always, very entertaining.

I'm pretty happy so far with the rate I've been going through these. I've gone through 5 lectures in one week. If that rate keeps up, I could finish by November or December. However, I expect that once it gets harder and into newer material, I will go more slowly. We'll see!

Physics: First Day

Today was my first full regular day, which includes the first day of my study of 8.01 through MIT's Open Courseware.

It went pretty well. Did some exercises, watched a lecture. Since it's the very beginning, it's only up to 1D kinematics, so it's mostly review. I like the style of the textbook though; the problems are actually pretty interesting. 

The lectures are given by the somewhat famous Prof. Walter Lewin. He's known for his exciting in-class demonstrations. In the very first lecture, when talking about measurements and accuracies, he gets a kid to come onstage and be measured lying down and standing up to prove that you're an inch taller lying down than standing up. 

The most important thing to come ouf of this first day, however, is assurance that it works. That I'll have time each day to devote to this, and so I look forward to learning physics!