Bodily Experience: Entrance Slip

People of often consider physics to be an abstract subject; the ideas are seemingly not related to everyday life, and math expression that resembles physics concepts are also highly symbolic. However, I argue that those who think physics is only about abstract ideas are wrong. Physics describes the motion of object; it is only when one can "see" the motion in a math expression do one truly understand the true meaning of physical principles.

I can think of two example: gravity and astronomy. Galileo postulated that all matters on Earth are accelerated equally by the gravitational pull of the Earth. Before Galileo's idea, the previous understanding of gravity was established by Aristotle, who believed that the acceleration is proportional to the mass of the object. Galileo's idea can instantly be understood, as the one that truly describes the nature, with the famous (thought) experiment of droping balls of different weights from the leaning tower of Pisa. Another example is more personal. I learned about different natural sources of radio waves of extraterrestrial origins, but I did not understand what they are, until we projected the observation of our telescope onto a map. You truly see the distribution of the sources and their strength when a projection is nicely made onto a screen. Same can be said in the difference between a star chart and a night time star observation.

Physics can only be truly understood if one experiences it personally. That's why I will use experiments that can be conducted using everyday objects (and/or computer simulation) in my class. That would make teaching physics more effective and interesting.