Before I get into the cranky part of this entry, I want to thank Sean Carroll, the intrepid cosmologist of "Preposterous Universe," for giving me a mention as "one of the cool kids" (even though I'm a lot older than he is). I am delighted to be part of the dark matter of the Blogosphere.

Now to the cranky part. I am reviewing straight-line motion and acceleration and distance yet again. This must be about the fifth time I have tried to learn this. I thought I learned it in 2002. I thought I had learned it in 2003. I thought I had surely learned it in 2004. (This assumes that in at least two of these years I even reviewed it twice.) But here in 2005, I am getting the wrong answers to the problems again. Why? How could I forget it so easily? I remember the formulas about acceleration and time and distance, but somehow when it comes to solving problems about these things, I lose out again and again. It's so frustrating.

One of the sources of my difficulty is that I am using not just one book to learn my classical mechanics, but a whole stack of them that reach from that dreary, heavy little tome from 1952 to a couple of current ones which are very lightweight, that is, figuratively so. I can't remember which one I used to teach me acceleration and motion the first time around. Each one takes a slightly different approach. Even the formulas are stated slightly differently. I want to re-trace my path to the one which first taught me, but which one was it? I am trying my own patience.

One of the most frustrating things about textbooks is that they only give answers to the odd-numbered problems. One of my Friendly Mathematicians once said that I should never even have the answers available to me. That might be right for a classroom, but if I am just struggling with it myself, how would I ever check my work? I cannot call up a Friendly Mathematician at 3 AM to ask why I didn't get the right answer. I have to go over it again and again and again. Sometimes it turns out that I mis-copied a number. Or added the wrong things; in other words, it was a failure of procedure. But if I really do misunderstand the process, I have no way of checking it other than to apply for time with a Friendly Mathematician/Physicist and wait till he can get back to me.

I'm often asked why I just don't take a course in this stuff and learn it that way. Well, the thought of sitting in a classroom to learn physics or math fills me with an unspeakable dread. It brings back every humiliating memory of my childhood, of being left behind further and further while the other kids went on learning. Would I be willing to do that again, this time outstripped by fresh young things thirty years my junior? I'd rather grub it out on the Internet and with my stack of learn-it-yourself books. Let me tell you, any textbook which is called "(Subject) Made Easy," isn't. They leave out too many steps in order to try to make it "easy." My best books, like the Schaum's Red Spine Book for trigonometry, put in every last little detail and give worked-out problems in pedantic, but satisfying multiple steps. I think there's a Red Spine book for classical physics. A few more bucks at Borders and it can join my tottering stack.

But here's an idea I've had for a long time. Our "virtual reality" technology is nearly able to create immersive, realistic "worlds." In fact, it is already there if you consider the elaborate scenes and characters from online games like the amazing "World of Warcraft," which a player friend showed me recently. What if there were online "worlds" for learning things rather than playing games? There, it would not matter how old you were or how fast or slowly you could learn. The online teaching area would be a safely maintained space, without harassment or pressure, where a virtual teacher existed only for you, or you and a few friends if you wanted. You could "order" the ideal teacher complete with a "personality" made to order: either a kindly gentle soul or a stern taskmaster or anything in between.

I got this idea from a famous book by Neal Stephenson, SNOW CRASH. In the course of the book, the hero, cleverly named "Hiro," enters a virtual library which is presided over by a virtual librarian, who does the research work on a hyper-wow search engine that covers the whole Earth. (This book was written in 1992, just before the beginning of the World Wide Web. Before Google. Like another century ago, man…) The hero meets the Librarian in this passage:

…"A man walks into the office. The Librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish, silver-haired, bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing a V-neck sweater over a work shirt, with a coarsely woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened, the sleeves pushed up. Even though he's just a piece of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a vast web of cross-references….He is eager without being obnoxiously chipper; he clasps his hands behind his back, rocks forward…raises his eyebrows expectantly over his half-glasses.…
…"Hiro says, "You're a pretty decent piece of ware. Who wrote you, anyway?"
"For the most part, I write myself," the Librarian says. "That is, I have the innate ability to learn from experience.…" (Neal Stephenson, SNOW CRASH, pgs 107-109)

Now this Librarian from Stephenson, the way he looks and acts, could just as well be a Physicist. I am not talking about the little army of ugly animated cartoon Einsteins which you see at physics sites and elsewhere. This would be a realistic, lifelike piece of teaching software. It would never be too busy to help me, it would never be asleep or worried about tenure or grants, and never be away from its post. It would write printable equations on a virtual blackboard, and most of all, it would, like Stephenson's "Librarian," learn from how I try to learn (and from parameters I could input, as well) until it knew just how to explain things to me. And best of all, it would be software, not a real person, so I could not bore it, exhaust its patience, or insult it. It would work with me until I finally learned what I needed to know. Then it would suggest that it was time to do something new. And while we're at it, you could encode psychological insight and realistic dialogue potential into it, so that when I was feeling down because I couldn't manage to review simple acceleration again, he would encourage me. (Being the kind of person I am, I'd probably write an entire personal history for him, so that he'd be a real fictional character.)

Someday soon, things like this will exist. But for now, it's back to my growing stack of books, and yet another attempt to accelerate.

Posted at 3:32 am | link