Aren’t high school physics courses full of math too? I recall feeling my high school physics courses were just calculus courses by another name. Of course, you could use a high school physics course as a springboard to learn the math…
Huh. I was starting to wonder if you knew me, but then I remembered I didn’t drop out to wander the world until grad school.
Wandering the world is overrated, by the way. :smack:
Also: xkcd: Purity
Really? Just curious because the first time I took calc physics 1 I got majorly screwed over because I took calc at the same time. I’ve mentioned this before but I took 2 tests, the physics test which repeated ask if you got Newton’s first law and a calc test. Results were yes I got N’s 1st law and my calc kind of sucked. Advice from physics prof at orientation was take that physcs. Unfortunately my math skills were so bad it turned into a total train wreck since they assumed that you already knew calc and used it during the class. That only got worse when they broke out the linear algebra and multivarient calculus. (I think it was multivarient calc. The prof kept showing us how to solve center of mass with an integral.) I should mention that the tests were a series of questions to derive equations for various situations. (In perhaps the most ironic thing of all I once got full credit on a question because I didn’t know what I was doing. Come to think of it I was probably one of the few in that class to ever get full credit on a question but I still almost flunked the course. Admittedly not as difficult as French though.)
Anyway years later at a different school I took calc based physics but this time I made sure I knew calc first. I kicked ass in that class. (But it often ruins mythbusters for me. 
)
how come i and almost all my friends agree that math (alg-calc-diff eq) is a lot easier than physics? by physics, i’m refering to the standard load for science and engineering majors covering motion, mass, force, electricity & magnetism, thermody, modern physics.
Well, to be honest, yeah the not knowing calc ahead of time did make the physics class a bit harder, but not the utter nightmare the algebra-based one had been without a good handle on that. Actually part of why it really worked for me was because at the beginning they did go through the calc steps, which I thought was a lot more valuable to me than what we were actually doing in the calc class. The physics class wasn’t exactly the most intense class in the world either, which helped.
It probably wasn’t the best approach if the goal was getting a good grade in the physics class, but I at least enjoyed how the two classes played off each other.
Math would HAVE to be “easier” than physics. Physics is applied math.
First you have to learn how to do the math then, in addition (no pun intended), you need to learn how to apply that math to physics problems.
when was calculus discovered, 17th century? engineers already had a pretty good idea of both structures (statics) and mechanics more than 1,000 years before this. poets and philosophers were already contemplating conservation of energy during the roman times.
but this doesn’t prove that physics can be learnt without math. there was already a whole load of math literature even before the romans.
Newton wrote his Principia without using calculus, but it is much harder to understand that way. Why did he do that? Well, I can think of two reasons. First calc was new and he wanted more people to be able to read it. Second, the conceptual basis (infinitesimals, numbers that are positive, but smaller than any “ordinary” number) was suspect and it took 150 years to put calculus on a rigorous foundation, avoiding infinitesimals, and nearly 300 years before Abraham Robinson discovered a rigorous foundation for dealing with infinitesimals.
That said, math is much easier than physics, at least for me. When I took physics, I was able to solve all the problems well enough to get an A, but I never felt I understood any of it in any real sense.
It is possible that physics is math. Literally.
Trust me, physics is extremely difficult without good math skills. You can learn some general principles, understand some explanations, but there isn’t much you can do with it without the math. There are many analogies used to describe physical principles, but they are only analogies. Years back I worked with physicists who could explain enough to satisfy my curiosity, and now there excellent mathematicians and physicists on the SMDB who could do the same thing, but that only slightly lessens my regret in not developing better math skills. I’d rather be able to understand it myself.
But that shouldn’t discourage you from learning. I’d rather have a broad but shallow understanding of physics than none at all. Since I have a narrow and shallow understanding now, I’ve still got work to do.
When I was in school long ago a common joke was:
“Math majors are former physics majors who dropped out of physics because the math was too hard.” 
I can recommend Academic Earth’s lessons on astrophysics with Charles Bailyn from Yale. He keeps the math at an absolute minimum and it is quite impressive to see how far you can go with very little math. It’s free so it might be a good place to start; he points out where the complex math stuff is “hidden”, so you can actually get a feel for how far you can go before you need to break out the advanced calculus stuff.
I’m a current physics major who started out with Atrocious Math Skills. My understanding of physics was not impacted by my crappy maths, at least at the superficial level, but I feel like I wasn’t able to actually do physics until the math clicked into place for me.
Certainly you can get into physics at a basic level w/o much math, but if your passion really sparks for it you may find yourself actually wanting to learn the maths to understand it better 
- Former English Major who fell in Crazy Mad Love with Astronomy
Not really. I studied physics in college, and although I liked math, I found the classes taught in the math department to be quite difficult. Doing the proofs to really understand math is extremely tough. We had 3 levels of math classes for calculus: one class for none science types, one for science types, and one for the hard core math majors. Most of us physics majors took the last one for Calc 1, but not for Calc 2. I did, and wish I hadn’t. Too much time spent on something I really didn’t need.
We had a class in applied math which compressed 3 semesters of math into one semester by glossing over the proofs. That was one of the best classes I ever took. I think the book we used was called “Mathematical Methods for the Physical Sciences”. But even that assumed you had a year of calculus, so it’s not a primer.
My undergraduate adviser, an Indian guy, said, “Oh, ant. I think you should take some physics.”
CP: Uh, Sir, Calculus is a prerequisite.
IG: Oh no! They are co-requisites!
So, the first physics lecture, the Prof was describing throwing your adviser off the roof. “If we take the derivative with respect to time…”
Thirty guys with one voice ask, “What’s a derivative?”
Prof: “Haven’t you guys had calculus?”
I was one of the 29 who dropped physics and took it the next semester when I’d had calculus.
Similar to Panurge’s Charles Bailyn from Yale this course claims to go over very basic physics and then jump to the advanced stuff, skipping over all that math grind.
and it’s companion website
http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physics10/pffp.html
Berkeley just changed all their stuff so I’m not sure what’s left there.
Nah, you can do a general physics 101 with nothing more than basic algebra. And being an engineer and a nerd, I consider this “basic knowledge” for an adult.
The instructor will have to stifle herself frequently to prevent from yelling out “Position - Velocity - Acceleration! This is Function - Derivative - Second Derivative! Physics is math, people!”
But it can be done. Back when I took physics in high school, there were two options. One was for people that had some calculus, one was for the others that hadn’t gotten there yet.
It’s a different sort of math, though. I got an A in physics the same year I got a D+ in Algebra II. Physics and chemistry are heavier on math that is closer similar to word problems (in that formulas have labels) than they are more abstract math courses. I had a hard time solving algebraic equations, but things like calculating velocity made a lot more sense to me because it’s more concrete.
[QUOTE=carnivorousplant;13979253
I was one of the 29 who dropped physics and took it the next semester when I’d had calculus.[/QUOTE]
You made the right decision if it was anything like the physics class I took. (It still boggles my mind that a physics professor actually advised me to take it given how weak my calc. I mean they had a test that told them that and he told me to take it anyway.) Of course like you when I took physics years later I made sure I knew calc well and that physics made sense. (Different school however.)