Hello and welcome to Fast Physics, where
I try to introduce you guys to topics in
physics as quickly,
painlessly, and hopefully as
interestingly as possible. I think that
the key difference between my videos and
others that you might see
is that I'm actually learning physics at
the moment too, so they'll mostly be
through a learner's perspective. I'll
share what resources
and strategies have worked for me, and
hopefully they'll work for you too.
I really hope that this works out well!
So in this video, we're going to be
answering some of the most
mind-boggling, brain-bending, difficult
questions in the history of mankind,
or at least in the history of Maggiekind since I've been discovering physics.
Firstly and most importantly--why is math
so hard and why have I been struggling
to learn it for the past 10 years since
kindergarten?
Secondly, what exactly is physics? And
finally,
what are physicists and what exactly do
they do?
Before we get into our questions, let me
introduce myself.
My name is Maggie, I'm 15, and I'm not a
physicist or a physics teacher
or anyone who's really qualified to be
teaching physics. I have been teaching
myself physics over this past summer,
though, and I feel like I've stumbled
into every single pitfall that physics
has to offer,
so hopefully I'll be able to act as a
kind of guide for you if you're learning
physics as well.
If you're just looking for a quick recap
of some of the topics in physics,
I hope that my videos will be able to
help you too. If you're currently
learning physics, I also definitely
recommend Khan Academy and the AP
Physics Collection--
it's a collaboration between Rice
University and OpenStax. Both of
them are free and online resources,
and awesome because they're free and online.
You gotta love free stuff like
that,
and like this elephant in the room here:
MATH.
Why is it so hard, and is it really worth
it learning a subject that involves so
much math?
Well, we actually don't need that advanced
of an understanding of math to do most
of basic physics, which is what I'm going
to be covering.
You only really need to know basic
algebra and trigonometry. But the more
important thing here
is that you shouldn't really be afraid
of math--it's honestly just a tool. A hard
to learn tool, a hard-to-use tool,
but a tool that ultimately helps us to
navigate the weird, weird world that we
live in, and I think that physics is
something that makes math meaningful in a way that
most other things really don't. If none
of that convinced you, let me just put it
this way: math helps you manage your money.
I probably sound like a nerd right now,
rhapsodizing about math ,so let's change
that from a probably to a definitely by
going back to physics. What exactly
is physics? According to this dictionary
right here,
physics is the science that deals with
matter and energy in terms of motion and force.
If you guys understood exactly what that
meant the second you heard it, I envy you
and respect you,
but for the rest of us let me put it
this way: physics is just civics for the
natural world.
In civics, we learn about the laws of a
country, and we study how the
relationships between the branches of
government
make the country that we live in the way
that it is. In physics, we do the same
thing.
We learn about the laws of the natural
world, and we learn about how the
relationships between things in the
natural world,
like matter and energy, motion and force,
make the natural world that we know the
way that it is.
It's kind of like when you're starting
to play smash, and you're starting to
discover all those character controls--
Once you've gotten them down you can
basically play every character. You might
not be good at them; you'll be absolutely
pulverized
by an expert, but even if you're playing
a new character that isn't your main,
you can pretty much figure that pressing
up B will be that character's recovery.
But that will only work if nobody has
reconfigured your control settings or,
within the context of this analogy,
if nobody has messed with the basic laws
of your smash universe. So now that we've established how we can compare
physics to civics or playing smash,
what are physicists? Are they the law
makers, or the ones that have to follow
the laws? Well, they're kind of both.
Physicists are people that look at
trends in the natural world--an apple
falling off a tree, me falling out of bed,
the milk jug falling out of the fridge
for the 50th time for no apparent reason--
and come up with theories to explain
those trends, and then come up with laws
that correspond to those theories
to try to predict how those trends will
continue to happen in the future.
But when I say "making" laws, it's more like they're just placing a label or a name
on a natural law that existed way before
they ever decided to even
investigate it. So physicists are really
just people that name already existing
natural laws and have to live in the
world that's governed by them just like
the rest of us.
Does that sound good and not too boring?
Well, most of physics is actually like
that: not nearly as intimidating as
it sounds.
I hope that you guys will continue to
explore it with me, and that you'll
subscribe and turn on post notifications
to find out when my next video comes out.
Thank you for watching, bye!
