This week was interesting. Most classes I expect to be in class, lecture all day, take notes, study, and have a test later. The first night we were informed that this wasn’t going to be our standard class. We would be doing work, but it would be all projects. We would learn the materials we needed to pass the course from the projects we perform during it. This first week was very hands on, once we got past the necessary reading of the syllabus, we started by doing a circle project. We were to measure the circumference and radius of each of a set of circles. The instructor kept telling us that we were not going to be learning anything new about circles themselves during this exercise. We took each of the circles out of the bag, used the tape to measure it, we then graphed the radius and circumference of the circles and got an average slope of guess what? Pi. The slope was steady and linear. We also had a discussion about what is reality, what is physics, and is physics reality?
The discussion went pretty well. We each person wrote down what we thought the answer to each question was, then we compared with a partner, then with the whole group. We then wrote 3 main points of each topic on a white board to share with the entire class. For reality there seemed to be a debate between reality being how things are, no matter how we may perceive them, which I believed, and reality being different to each person, it is how it is perceived by the individual. Then when asked about physics, we all had a concrete answer that physics is man’s attempt to understand the universe around him, how it works, and why it works that way. The third question I thought was really good, it was is physics reality? My answer was no, physics is only man’s attempt to understand reality, and as man’s understanding of reality gets better, the field of physics will also get better, and more accurate. I still hold to that belief.
As for questions, I don’t really have any, we just started the course, and I don’t think I have gone deep enough into it yet to have questions. The only questions I would have would be about the project. How are we going to do a 10 minute presentation on it next Thursday without knowing a lot of the basic principles yet? How do we calculate the equations we need to explain in our writing on the project? But as far as that goes, I am sure we will figure all of that out before we cross that bridge.
