Current Events > How is physics taught without calculus

(+) Yeah! (+)

I forget how they taught physics back in HS tbh...

But it's pretty apparent now that physics without calculus is like playing a Mario game with a keyboard. What's the point of teaching physics without calculus and how do they do it? >_>

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f = ma

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They just give you the equations that are derived with calculus and pretend like they appear out of thin air.

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Garioshi posted...

They just give you the equations that are derived with calculus and pretend like they appear out of thin air.

If someone else has already done the work, you don't have to.

Crono99 posted...

It's actually more difficult since you're expectes to memorize instead of understand

Kind of like trig at first

Memorizing is far easier then understanding wtf

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Garioshi posted...

They just give you the equations that are derived with calculus and pretend like they appear out of thin air.

Yeah this.

Like I was good at Physics even in high school (without calculus) but once I got to university and they introduced calculus and showed how everything was derived everything just instantly made more sense.
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Makeveli_lives posted...

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Memorizing is far easier then understanding wtf

Depends

For me, memorising is hard
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This may be why I failed. I remember asking a lot why does this mean that? I needed to understand

ap physics is taught with calculus and actually requires you be at least taking it concurrently

ditto for university physics classes--electromagnetism requires multivariable calculus for example

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teepan95 posted...

Depends

For me, memorising is hard

You also end up memorizing the derivation at some point, so it's just more memorization.

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memorizing involves less cognitive demand than understanding

but is not necessarily easier, depending on the person

Most of the basics dont require any calculus. You dont need it to understand conservation of energy and momentum, the momentum principle, or even most of the basic equations of electricity and magnetism

Even the basics of relativity dont require calculus to work the problems. It isn't until you start deriving other equations that you need derivatives and integrals, or series expansions

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Gwynevere posted...

Most of the basics dont require any calculus. You dont need it to understand conservation of energy and momentum, the momentum principle, or even most of the basic equations of electricity and magnetism

Even the basics of relativity dont require calculus to work the problems. It isn't until you start deriving other equations that you need derivatives and integrals, or series expansions

velocity and acceleration (first chapter of kinematics) involve calculus. whether or not you use it is a different issue.

https://xkcd.com/435/
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High school physics is pretty simplified. It rarely accounts for all the forces at play and often pretends everything within the problem takes place within a vacuum.

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Gobstoppers12 posted...

High school physics is pretty simplified. It rarely accounts for all the forces at play and often pretends everything within the problem takes place within a vacuum.

i mean i'm about to get my bachelor's in physics and i can count the number of times i've considered air resistance on one hand

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Sackgurl posted...

ap physics is taught with calculus and actually requires you be at least taking it concurrently

That was not the case when I took it!
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the same way mathematics is taught without the likes of analysis or number theory
they pretty much just tell you how something works without explaining why

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Gwynevere posted...

You dont need it to understand conservation of energy and momentum, the momentum principle, or even most of the basic equations of electricity and magnetism

you absolutely need it to understand these concepts because they are laws that were determined by derivation from other, known laws, using calculus.

you don't need it to use the equations for conservation of energy/momentum to solve simple problems, but you do need it if you begin with acceleration as a function of time and need to calculate potential energy, or other calculations that start from one side of the derivation and require you to move to the other (AKA, problems that actually test your understanding of physics)

the same is true for understanding electric potential over a surface or charge across a line. yes you can use ohm's law without calculus. that is not electromagnetism.

Gwynevere posted...

Even the basics of relativity dont require calculus to work the problems. It isn't until you start deriving other equations that you need derivatives and integrals, or series expansions

special relativity requires derivative calculus and general relativity requires linear algebra

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