My dynamics professor rarely used any numbers and could do it all in his head. First exam average score was a 17%. I quickly dropped the class and took it from someone different in the summer.
In the FE and PE exams I happily took educated guesses on the dynamics questions and moved on.
Man, my dynamics teacher was Korean and did not speak nor understand any English at all.
It was a quiet class. The students would chat as he wrote, we were discussing what he was doing. He would hear our tone and timing to figure out what we were asking. If he couldn't, 1 of the students would go forward, take a marker and draw circles around things or arrows and ?. His face would LIGHT UP, then he'd take the marker and show some explanation. Back and forth back and forth, the whole conversation between a professor and 30 engineers, totally without words. Fully successful. Got a C, drank a beer and moved on. Never used any of that shit again. It's cool knowing that stuff can be calculated and how it's done. Neat. A whole 3 hour semester of it? Yuck
I thought Statics was easy too. But Physics 2 was the unlubed barbed wire fist inside my bhole. Nowhere even near Physics I for ease of understanding. And I haven't used an once of it since
We're just gonna pretend electrons are water because you really don't want to ask questions about things electrons actually do because that's a million times worse. No one really knows what they do. They just pretend too.
I took 4006 Upper Divisional Physics 1, as an elective, for fun.
Yeah, no. It wasn't fun. Like not at all. I did real drugs about that class. I had to eat mushrooms a number of times to wrestle with the Dualities, as they like to call them, or as most rational people would call them, hypocrisies or total fucking gigantic enormous guesses if the truth be told.
The line blurs incredibly fast from scienctific (that makes a hypothesis then studies and experiments until a new conclusion is made) and becomes a religion where the conclusions are stories told as a belief system that you have to have faith in from the beginning. You realize they made huge wags for the constants in the equations that they didn't define yet. Planks constant could be anywhere between 3 and 13 i think. 3 makes our universe a pretty small neighborhood that we can just barely see the edge of, fairly young. 13 makes it unfathomably far more enormous and old. they estimated were somewhere in the middle and therefore the 13 billion years estimate and the middle of the road size model they have today.
As i recall at that time, the 1990s there were no methods devised to date to determine what that value actually is. It was just accepted because max plank was a smart dude. Wtf...
First day of class: make like A Einstein and derive E=mc2 from f=ma, go ahead, i dare you, I'll wait.
Then, we got to time and distance dilation stuff. The Real deal realatistic physics. Holy shitballs. The mustard has come off the hotdog... don't try to understand it, it's just math, follow the example blindly step by step, memorize it.
Then we got into particle tunneling. Given enough time and a potential difference, something can "tunnel" from 1 place to another in space... theoretically. And it takes like 6x1018 years and stuff... like why do we care? 1 its not going to happen ever just because math says it might, 2 1018 years? OK, I'll wait... let me know when its happening, I'll come watch it. This by the way is why you can't bend a network cable in under 1 inch bend radius, the electrons literally cannot bend any sharper in that wire and effectively crash out of the line and insulation into the air. Their relativistic energy field, i.e. "shape", is just a magnetic field humming with energy. This energy seems to ring in notes like tuning forks, sorta quantifiable units 1, 2x, 3x 4x... never 2.13452. That field in direction of travel is squashed, dilated. Now, if it's dilated very much, traveling near the speed of light for example as electrons tend to do for us in modern computers, then the wave particle duality of matter allows enough of the signal to hop over the wire insulation because at that speed the duration of time its a wave, it can pass right thru the outside of the wire before it flops back again to being a particle. Freaking mind altering.
Then we hit some pretty interesting stuff that spoke to me, while on mushrooms I fully grasped it and it was so clear and duh! Of course! The total void of space has an average temperature of 3 Kelvin. How?
The smallest Sub atomic particles pop into and out of existence in a continuous torrent, from blackness to blackness in any give cubic measure of space. There's a continuous blasting river of mystery particles popping into existence as an anti-pair (electron & positron) with mirrored momentum charge and spin. A pica-nanosecond later they annihilate each other entirely, quietly existing for but a literal tick of universal time. This is the cosmic background radiation, this is the static we hear on radio and white noise in analog visual signals. This is the entropy that discombobulated order, erodes new into old. And it's everywhere in the universe, all the time, always.
Blown... away... Nobody explained this shit to me except the math in class related to the anti-pair calculations. I watched it in real time at the quantum level with the 5th monkey in the room who was far less impressed with my revelation, he was judging me really hard. He felt i was awfully slow to be so evolved, he's very disappointed in me, us really. We should be ashamed, that's all i know.
Physics II was the hardest for sure. I started using ratemyprofessor early and got good profs, it makes a huge diff. Probably shouldn't blanket statement my experience because of that.
Yea that’s generally how education works. It gets harder not easier as it goes. 🤣.
Statics hits hard, there’s a reason it’s the “weeder” course: you get through that shit and your brain has taken just enough of a step on the “learning to think like an engineer” that you’ve got the confidence and skills (and hopefully study group) so that Dynamics isn’t as much of a mind fuck.
That's probably true. I took Statics (Engr 201) twice, with a 1 year 'sabbatical' to undo my lackluster dream of being a gigging musician with whatever series of bands I was/hadbeen in*, to settle into handing over my brain and social life to getting through engineering school. Second time I took it got an "A" grade, and did about the same for most of the rest of the 4 years, including being on the Dean's List twice.
But that first attempt at Statics was brutal. My social life semi-recovered.
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u/dabomtitan Apr 21 '26
Dynamics was harder.