I've fired my virtual artillery, shot my bullet points at the enemy 100 meters above my position, swum y-coordinate rivers under enemy vector fire, and my air force has dropped vector bombs at hostile problems. Numbers exploded into millions of fractions. The war is over for now, and I have left behind a wasteland of solved physics problems. So now I must march on.

The territory I will be encountering is familiar to me. I have already gone through this in Barron's "Physics Made Easy." But now I'm in Schaumland, and I want my physics to be less easy. Having fought the war, I must now work to reconstruct the land for peaceful purposes of agriculture and industry. That means re-learning about all those objects held or dragged by ropes, things rolling or sliding down inclined planes, pushing and pulling bales and boxes, and eventually building simple factories where I crank water out of wells and lift weights with levers and pulleys. I will re-construct civilization with high school physics problems. Mr. Newton will be my ever-present guide.

It seems as though I am just doing things over and over again, in a cycle of learning, problem-solving, forgetting, re-learning, solving the same problems over again, and then forgetting them again. How much do I need to have at hand all the time? How much physics do I need to keep in my virtual knapsack, available to me at all times, and how much can I leave in the library, to be looked up when necessary? It is dismaying to me how slowly and repetitively I progress in my physics studies. But I suppose that is how civilization is built: war and destruction, reconstruction, more war, more reconstruction, and eventually, some progress. But I'd like to get to the nineteenth century, let alone the twentieth or twenty-first, before an actual century has gone by.

Posted at 3:18 am | link