There is a Website, just recently started, called Happy News.com, fashioned in a cheery yellow color, which has taken up the (thankless) task of reporting only positive and inspiring news. Some of this is real news, other material on the site is the kind of thing that gets written about in small-town newsletters when there isn't anything much to report. In the relentlessly ironic, bitter, brutal, and often obscene cultural world we currently inhabit, this is a little yellow flower growing in a pavement crack.

I would like to have said, over 2005, that this Blog was more upbeat, more like Happy News when it comes to my studying physics, and that I could report that I am mastering calculus. But this is Electron Blue, not Electron Yellow, and so the level of grousing, griping, and whining probably will stay as it is. If I do succeed at something, you'll be the first to know. At least the antibiotics are working and the infection and pain that prevented my Christmas vacation has disappeared, or more likely gone dormant until it can be fully treated at a later date.

I had recourse to a Friendly Scientist to help me with a set of high-school-level gravity and planet problems which I could not solve. He helped me solve two of them. The solutions involved dividing an equation (made from Newtonian formulae) by another similar equation, so that terms could be simplified. I had never encountered this procedure before, in my years of studying math, and like a diner encountering an unknown and unusual piece of silverware, I wonder, "What is this?" "How come I never saw it before?" And, "What do you use it for, and when?" Is it for picking oysters out of their shells, or holding a buttery corncob? The problem was, I could work a problem by tracing through the solution the Friendly Scientist gave me, but when I tried to do the same thing with the next problem, I failed. The closest I came was when I got the right numbers, but the exponent (in scientific notation) was way out of range.

I am sure that there are some people who will be doing physics on Christmas Day instead of tearing apart bright wrapping paper and eating too much. I may be one of them. I feel a kind of humiliation that I have not been able to work through these gravity problems. The more I look through this array of Newtonian formulae, the more confused I get. But my physics pride won't let me go on until I know what I was doing wrong. Instead of colorful wrapping paper, I tear apart my failed and overelaborate calculations (simple as they are). I am told that there are more efficient solutions to these gravity problems which I will learn later on, but in my childish way I want to know, why couldn't I solve it the way the book was supposed to have taught me?

Those who do physics on Christmas Day have proposed a replacement holiday for Christmas. It's called "Newtonmas." You see, Sir Isaac Newton (he of the gravitational formulae which are bewildering me) was born on Christmas Day, in 1642. You decorate the tree with apples, and honor Newton (and secular, scientific humanism) with intellectually oriented gifts. It sounds earnest, right-minded, and wintry wistful, kind of like "Happy News."

Happy holidays, patient readers, Friendly Scientists, and cyberwanderers all. May your chaotic paths be guided by benevolent intelligence.

Posted at 5:32 pm | link