General Physics Highlight (Extra Fall Edition)
Physics 3: General Physics I (and this blog post) exists for the sake of people who don't plan to go into physics or engineering but need physics as part of their major or pre-health requirements. I'm not pre-health, but I'm majoring in neuroscience, and one of the prerequisites for the major is a physics class.
I had to choose between taking chemistry or physics as my science prerequisite. I had already taken a lot of chemistry classes in high school, and I decided that I probably had a more significant knowledge gap in the domain of physics than chemistry. I thought about the times when I got confused in neuroscience and realized that the brain phenomena that confuse me the most always involve physics
That's how I found myself in the big auditorium-like room in Wilder Hall (building home to the physics department), taking Physics 3 with Professor Ryan Hickox. Physics 3 is a really fun class, and I'm not qualifying it as "fun" just because I'm nice or because that's the general phrase ("Oh, yeah, it's a fun class"). Physics 3 is FUN—at least during the lectures—because Professor Hickox does his best to illustrate EVERY phenomenon we learn about with demonstration in real life and in real time
So far, Professor Hickox has come to class in roller skates to demonstrate friction and Newton's third law of motion. He's shot a golf ball at a target suspended from the ceiling (to demonstrate that even if the target falls, the golf ball will still hit it). He's driven a small car propelled forward by a fire extinguisher. He's climbed a twenty-foot ladder to drop off two lead balls. He's crashed a cannonball pendulum into a huge gray brick in the middle of the classroom...
And he does all that because he trusts physics. You see, he's got faith that the physics he teaches us is actually TRUE and the world will act according to his expectations
Ok, now, seriously.
I don't really think of PHYS 3 as a class I'm taking just for neuroscience. These days, I find myself thinking about Physics 3 as the class that will fill in the gaps in my understanding of the physical world, of the little things that you notice and wonder about and have a fuzzy understanding from high-school physics but that you could never coherently explain even if your life depended on it. Hopefully, by the end of this term, I'll be able to explain some of the things that have always puzzled me and can give satisfying answers to my baby sister when she grows up and enters the toddler stage of constantly asking "Why? Why? Why?