Midnight at the Electron. The air is as warm and heavy as cream. Two layers of clouds pass over the Blue Moon of July: one lower down, swift and tumbling and fluffy, the other higher up, variegated, sharp, and iridescent in the full moon's light. Every so often heat lightning, reflecting from distant storms, flickers on the clouds. The trees are full of insect song and katydid chatter. Brown bats dash through the air, swooping in and out of their nests inside my building's roof. In the clear black sky-spaces between the clouds, I can see the bright stars of the Great Summer Triangle, directly overhead: Vega, Deneb, and Altair. Moon, lightning, stars, the photons of August.

Fear of Physics

I'm multiplying and dividing long numbers by using logarithms. Or trying to, at any rate. I must get the logarithm of each number by going to the table and interpolating between the log readings until I match the fourth significant digit. Then I must add or subtract the logarithms, making sure I take into account the negative logarithms which are to be expressed by the difference of positive numbers. Then I must find the anti-logarithm of the result, again interpolating into the log tables using the not-so-handy charts of "proportional parts." This is a long process. The tables are in small print and the first number of each mantissa is not printed with it, but set off to the left side, so it's easy to lose track of what the first digit might be. Since I am adding and subtracting by hand, I often make clerical mistakes. And even when I'm finished after at least fifteen minutes of calculation, the number I get does not match exactly the one that my calculator squirts out in a half a second. It is usually one significant digit different, even when you round off the longer number to a shorter one.

Clerical accuracy, Miss Pyracantha. How will you find your place among the "computer girls" in the astrophysics lab if you make so many mistakes? Here, sez I, let me show you this device I sneaked in from the twenty-first century. It's a pocket calculator.

It's been almost four years since my epiphany at Fermilab. I started seriously studying mathematics in early 2001. I've worked on arithmetic, basic and intermediate algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and now logarithms. But what about physics? After all, this is what I resolved to learn. Yet in these years I have had only a little of what would truly be called "physics." Sure, I've done a large amount of mathematics, especially for someone who had no ability and little knowledge of it when I started. And I remember a quote from some famous physicist (can't remember who) when he was asked what you needed to learn to study physics: "Mathematics, mathematics, and more mathematics."

Plenty of math, then, but not much physics. What I've done has been fragmentary. I've read about Newton's laws, and can quote them to you, but without truly understanding what an "equal and opposite reaction" is despite many patient attempts to explain it to me. (How can a wall "push back?") I've done distance, rate, and time problems. I've read about pseudoforces and momentum and velocity. I've done a fair number of vector problems, but if I were faced with one right now I would panic and I'd have to go back and read about it in my book again before I could solve it. I've learned what the acceleration of gravity is, what acceleration is, and how you calculate it given the data on how fast something is going, how fast it was going, and how long it's been going. Many fragments, but no continuity.

I have so far searched in vain for a text or website which would connect all these things together and make sense to me. Since I have never taken a physics course, I have "no prior knowledge of the subject" which puts me in a class with elementary-school children. The materials for my level of physics understanding are for kids. They are colorful, toy-like Web animations or virtual worlds full of cartoon characters and earnest multicultural children doing simple fun experiments that I never did in school. I guess no one thinks that any middle-aged person would ever start learning physics from the ground up, any more than a middle-aged person would take up some physically taxing sport like gymnastics or rugby when he/she had never done it before.

Some of my Friendly Scientists still suggest that there are "physics for poets" or "physics for non-concentrators" books and courses which have no equations or math so they would teach me and not trouble me with any of that "hard" stuff. Well, dudes, you just don't understand. I WANT hard stuff. I don't want charming little animated pink cartoons, but dry text, black and white diagrams, and whole pages of mathematical problems to solve. I want that victorious rush of solving a problem correctly, not a warm fuzzy glow of soft learning. How can I know whether I have really understood something if I don't solve problems in it?

I've got a couple of old college physics texts that one of my Friendly Mathematicians gave me, but they quickly vault into calculus, where I have not yet ventured. Same with other college physics texts. Lately I have come across a fairly good physics learning site, The Physics Classroom which is aimed at high school kids but seems to have a bit more dignity than some of the other learning sites. It has problems to solve, but it still has cartoons. The trouble with learning from websites is, obviously, that I have to be at my computer to use them. I have plenty of paper books purporting to teach me basic physics but somehow I haven't been able to work with them. I figure that this must be my fault, either through laziness or lack of concentration or what physicist and writer Lawrence Krauss called, in one of his book titles, "Fear of Physics." (I've read that book, but should read it again.) There's even a "Fear of Physics" site which I once frequented. I may have learned a bit from it, and I appreciated the problems it was able to give me, but I didn't like its childish graphics and kid-oriented text. I keep looking, but perhaps I'm not looking in the right place, or I'm too picky. Or perhaps what I'm looking for doesn't exist. I am ashamed of myself. I've had almost four years to learn basic physics, and I haven't gotten beyond middle school. What is all this mathematical toil for, if not to do physics the way the big boys do it?

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