The color of the cover alone tells me that I am in trouble. It is a violent yellow with bright green, red, and white graphics on it. The color of the yellow is the one that is used for those "accident/crime scene: do not cross" tapes you see on the road, roping off a place of crashing and carnage. The book is "THE HIGH SCHOOL PHYSICS TUTOR, Second edition. The complete study and answer guide to any textbook," by the ominously anonymous "Research and Education Association." Inside, some names surface: Dr. M. Fogiel, chief editor, and Joseph J. Molitoris, from the Department of Physics at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. The alarming cover, with its hectic graphics, only underscores the fact that if I took a test in classical physics right now, I'd fail miserably.

It's all problems, all the time. Not only that, the problems are all worked out and explained, with the solutions right there, so if I want to test myself without any recourse to help, I have to cover the solution part with a piece of opaque paper so that I won't cheat. I scribble away, try to find a solution, and only then do I pull the paper away to reveal that I have forgotten what I learned only a month ago. Back to the industrial drawing board, back to tensions in ropes and hanging weights and ladders and struts and supports and forces and inclined planes and accelerating objects.

The notation in the Yellow Book is different from what I learned in Barron's. I still haven't figured out what some of those signs mean. I'll figure 'em out sooner or later. And some of the problems cover stuff I haven't done yet, because the sequence of things to learn in each book I have is different. I've been wondering, for instance, just what a force is. Now I have a definition: "A force is a push or a pull acting on some object," says the "Research and Education Association" collective, henceforth referred to as REA. (The more one advances in physics, the more acronyms you use, so I'd better get started now.) Push me, pull you; the forces are equal and opposite.

Chapter one covered vectors, which I have actually managed to learn. I do wonder, though, whether you can do vector problems without drawing a diagram. There must be some ultra-pure mathematical types who can do them without drawing anything. That isn't me, unfortunately. As a visual artist and graphic designer, I live in a world of color, type, design, composition, and symbol that most physicists (unless they branch out into the arts) are blissfully unaware of. That eye-blasting yellow cover might not bother Joe Physicist, but it yells DANGER! DANGER! to me. At least I won't lose the book in the clutter of my studio.

So it's back to reviewing, for the second and third and fourth time, all those problems from the industrial floor of the seventeenth century, with cable tensions, rough-hewn blocks, toiling workmen, rumbling carts, and falling weights. If I keep having to review, I may never get farther than beginning classical mechanics. Sisyphus, endlessly rolling his stone up the inclined plane until it rolled back down, must have been an early physicist.

Posted at 3:07 am | link