I am back in my studio residence after an exhausting week traveling to Massachusetts, putting my art show up, and returning. The journey to New England takes two days of hard driving. I have to go through six or seven big cities to get there, and all but a few miles of this almost-500 mile trip are through heavily urbanized areas.

Most of my readers already know where I start my journey, but for those few Electron readers who don't know, I am located near Washington, DC, in the teeming suburbs of Northern Virginia. To get to Massachusetts, I must pass through or near DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia/South Jersey, North Jersey/New York, New Haven, and Hartford. Only north of Hartford, Connecticut, does the road lose its urban congestion and pass into the dark, piney woods.

I have been making this journey for more than seventeen years, two or three times a year. So I have made it at least fifty times. It does not get any easier over the years. I am not a trucker, used to doing this professionally. The entire trip takes ten to eleven hours if driven straight through, but I break it into two segments, with a stopover. There are always traffic backups due to accidents, roadwork, or just plain crowding. There are messy, pot-hole-ridden roads. There is bad weather, as I had on my way up, and there are bad drivers, which I must watch for at all times. But there are also my favorite landmarks, which I wait for: the tall bridges of Maryland and Delaware, the BASF plant in central New Jersey, the awesome oil refineries of Elizabeth, New Jersey, with their blazing gas flares. There are the towers of New York, now diminished by two; the first white New England church spire in southern Connecticut, the glimpse of ocean near West Haven, Connecticut, the groves of dark pines north of Hartford, and the "Traveler" restaurant in Union, Connecticut at the Massachusetts border. This eatery with its distinctive yellow roof also features a used book store and an antique store among the pines. This is the path of the Electron.

I'm often asked why I don't just take the plane, which would get me to New England in much less time. The reason is that I am often taking wagonloads of stuff to and from my parents' home, and the bulky goods would be impossible to haul on board a plane. This time, my car was full of art. Or as they say in the Boston area, my cah was full of aht.

So now the art is up on the walls. That mission is accomplished, and I have no idea whether anyone will buy the paintings. It is a market that I have never entered before; the Bakery on Natick Center's Common is frequented by a much wider assortment of people than the science fiction fans who have previously viewed and bought my art. I am interested in what their reaction will be. The art is quite close to the tables. But fortunately, coffee splatters wash off of acrylic paint.

As an aspiring physicist (to which I cannot really aspire) I've noticed that many physicists do risky, macho endurance sports like mountain and rock climbing, high slope skiing, marathon running, and triathlons. It seems to be part of physics culture. For my physicist endurance sport, I have chosen "long-distance high speed urban driving." This sport takes me from the desolate stretches of the New Jersey Turnpike to the chaotic orbits of the Capital Beltway. During my journeys, I get to watch physics in action: acceleration, momentum, centripetal force, banked turns, even low-speed relativity as I watch vehicles "recede" in my rear-view mirror, though they are not going backwards at all.

Lost October

Despite my art production and my road-tripping bravado, my physics studies are not going well at all. I tried to keep at the work while I was finishing my show art, but I was just too busy to do a lot with it. I was also sick for two weeks, and unable to concentrate, so I lost a lot of time in October. I will have to review the whole tedious business of cord tensions and sliding blocks. I tried to go through the section on Newton's law of universal gravity when I was up in Massachusetts, but I didn't get far. I am bogged down not only in gravity, but in the notation that Schaum's uses to describe physics and its equations. For instance, there are lots of different sub-scripts which are not always adequately explained. Evidently a subscript indicates what the main letter is referring to. I've had to figure out the difference between capital G (the constant of gravity) and small g which is the acceleration of gravity. This is the written notation of physics, and I have to learn it. It's kind of like Russian script, where I can figure out some of the letters, but not others. I'd better get used to it.

I've been through these things before. Do I really have to go through things three times in order to learn them? I guess I do. I started with a very simple introduction book. Then I went through the same thing in Barron's "Made Easy" book. Now I am working through Schaum's, and it is as if I never studied it before. Maybe I should have just started with Schaum's and not used the easier intro books. I feel obligated to learn the material well enough so that I could solve problems in it without referring back to the examples in the book. It seems that the only way I can learn something is to solve many, many problems with it. I cannot skip over problems in Schaum's lists, because each one builds on information that is solved for in the previous one.

I would like to straighten out some of my confusion with the help of one of my physicist friends, but my "Friendly Scientists" are scattered throughout the USA, accessible only by Internet. The closest one is in Baltimore, and I only see him once a year, at the Baltimore science fiction convention. Some things are best worked out in actual face-to-face tutorials, rather than online. But that's very hard to do, for me. In a classroom, I'd already be hopelessly behind, the way I was in high school. But if I can travel the Jersey Turnpike fifty times, for seventeen years, I can somehow work out the difficulties of high-school physics.

Posted at 2:20 am | link