I'm back home, at work on the most basic high school physics, contemplating the proportionality of velocity, time, and impulse force. A lot of force in a short time can do the same work as a little force in a long time. Well, maybe. This is like my own path in learning physics. My hypothetical young teen physicsboygenius has a lot of learning force and can learn his classical physics and calculus in just a couple of months. I have only a little learning force so I have to drag it out over years.

There's all this exciting modern physics out there, packaged for us consumers in non-mathematical candy wrappers. I know many artists, writers, and non-technical intellectual types, who think that because they have read some of these books, they actually know about modern physics. Even worse, I find "spiritual" types who think that because they have read some of these sweetened books about modern physics, they think they know about it, and that it has something to do with spirituality. I would like to say something about this, but I am not qualified to do so. This doesn't stop other bloggers, but it stops me.

This Weblog is an exercise in limits, in many ways. (But I haven't gotten to calculus limits yet.) There are a lot of things I just can't talk about here, for fear of offending and losing my few readers. For instance, I hesitate to talk about religion because my Atheist readers will be put off. And I can't talk about gender, women, and physics, because it is such a controversial topic that it will cause my sensitive readers either to tune out or to violently accuse me of the worst sin a thinker can commit, which is, "making sweeping generalizations!!!" I wouldn't want that on my conscience now, would I?

So I must restrict myself to talking about my learning physics and mathematics, and my art work, or whatever interesting but neutral topic comes up. So I'm back to high school. There's work, force, distance, and there's energy, both kinetic and potential. There's mass, weight, acceleration, and Newton. I'm still in the seventeenth century, and will be for quite a while.

When I was in Cambridge I bought a couple of really nice books on modern physics and philosophy, which I will be reporting on here when I read them. Right now I'm holding them on the shelf, and not reading them. I don't feel as though I deserve to read about modern physics until I at least have learned more classical mechanics. I don't want to be one of those types who read the non-mathematical physics books and think they know what they are talking about. I want to be able to read the physics books that are nearly all math, and understand what the author is talking about. This may take forever, or at least a metaphorical forever. But I am consoled by one fundamental thing I've noticed, just with Newton's equations. Force equals mass times acceleration: a law that seems to work everywhere, at least in the world above the quantum level. Now that's one great big sweeping generalization.

Posted at 2:55 am | link