Making your mom proud (if she’s a physicist) August 19, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in gifted, homeschooling, older son, physics, science.Tags: homeschooling, older son, physics, science
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One of the classes that the older boy is doing this year is physics. Rather than give him something very math intensive, I instead chose to have him study from Paul Hewitt’s Conceptual Physics text. It’s a book I came across after I’d already had a couple years of physics, and I regret not having had that book first. It does a wonderful job of explaining how physics works and what the concepts mean without drowning the reader in math.
When I picked up the older son after his study session the other day, he began talking about how imbalances in forces are what cause objects to accelerate. For instance, a car will move forward when the force created by the engine to move the car forward exceeds the forces of friction, gravity (if it’s on a hill), etc. After listening, I asked the question, “What happens then if the forces become balanced?”
I fully expected him to say that the object would stop moving. I really did. This is what the vast majority of students in my physics labs assumed when asked that question. Their assumption is that the forces must always be out of balance if the object is moving.
His response:
It would really depend on if the object were moving or still to begin with. If it was moving, it would continue to do so, and if it wasn’t moving, it would continue to stay still.
My response was to yell, “Yes!!!!!” at the top of my lungs and pump my fist. I’ve been proud of my son many times over the past few years, but few things make me beam as much as displaying a clear understanding of Newtonian mechanics.
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Yay for you both!
We just saw an awesome mythbusters in which Jamie gets corrected when he says that two semis crashing into each other at 50mph is the same as one semi crashing into a wall at 100mph. It was SO awesome. (They crashed a lot of cars to prove him wrong, and set up a really nifty physics experiment with weights, pendulums, and clay.)