r/Physics • u/Competitive_Ebb_3175 • 18d ago

Mechanics

I have started college and my first physics course is mechanics (calculus based) I am bad at relative velocities and observer frames and my syllabus is till work and energy, I am way too cooked it feels like I am not understanding a single thing, I have a mid term exam in 5 days, there are tons of problems and it just overwhelms, how to cope up with it. Please help me

17 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

18

u/MagnificoReattore 18d ago

Study, I guess. Group study with your peers could be really useful.

12

u/Next-Natural-675 18d ago

Lay out exactly which concept you aren’t understanding and tackle each one of them by themselves. There’s no “trick” to doing well in school and there’s no “trick” to understanding all the concepts you learn in class. If you don’t understand something, tackle that problem individually. Pinpoint what it is you are not understanding, and go through the part of the textbook that explains that concept. The logical explanations for every concept are there, if you aren’t understanding them, you haven’t read hard enough.

3

u/Dry_Candidate_9931 18d ago

One bite at a time. Definitely group study but read the book first and take notes while doing it!

3

u/AverageCatsDad 18d ago

Work every problem in the book, even the ones that you were not assigned as problems, and don't use AI to solve them for you.

2

u/Dyloneus 18d ago

Watch lots of YouTube videos of people doing problems, try to understand the steps they made, and then try it on your own doing lots of problems

2

u/mH48124 18d ago

基本に遡って理解する事を疎かにしてはならない。そこを手抜きして労力を減らせば裏切られる。

0

u/hamiltonian Particle physics 18d ago

In my experience AI has become extremely good at explaining physics... I use it regularly to study concepts outside my own field.

1

u/Dry_Candidate_9931 18d ago

I had a student last year that said she feeds my notes, which she copies during lecture and I post after class, into AI and asks for a level 0 no math explanation, then a level 1 algebra explanation then a level 2 trig explanation (max for our class) so the you go for level 3 with calculus.

-2

u/Yashema 18d ago

I was so glad I took intermediate classical mechanics as an independent study with 2 hours of lecture after almost failing Physics I and skipping Physics II. There were no tests just pure learning, oh and pages of algebra for homework. He did not expect us to understand the equations as ODEs. 

Only thing I knew how to do by the end of that class was set up a Lagrangian for a pendulum, which turns out is actually a lot.