3-08-04 11:51 PM

Well, I absolutely had to study today. So I did ... O wait, no I fucking didn't. But instead I reread part of a book and then played DDR and went to the gym ... so I'm an idiot.

I think that this semester, I'm finally going to fuck up my life like I've been clearly meaning to do since I was born. That's good, it's about time I stopped putting that off.

No wait, I'll even procrastinate that. I'll go study now. Bye.

2-21-04 2:40 AM

Art is the highest of human achievements.

Just kidding.

2-16-04 3:25 AM

Physics cannot be taught.

It just gets too complicated to follow. Now, maybe I'm just stupid. Maybe I've merely hit the upper limit of complexity of what I can follow passively. But everyone must have such a limit. And that is why physics cannot be taught. I now understand why people hate the subject. They go to lectures and they expect that, as they do for their other classes, that they will be able to follow what is going on, and that the teacher will answer their questions, and that they will learn.

I used to approach the subject that way, and I did fine. In HS, I would watch Charanis do a few problems on the board, and that was it, I could get an A on the tests, because I could follow what he was doing and his motivation for doing it. Most of the other kids would stare at the board and see nothing. And so eventually they stopped staring and instead slept. And now I understand why.

Trying to follow what my professor is doing in thermal and statistic physics is impossible for me. Notice that I didn't say that it is impossible in general. Maybe there are people out there who are smarter than me and would be able to follow what he was doing. But I can't. At first I thought that what he was doing was ridiculous. After all, I had always bee able to follow my other physics classes. If I couldn't follow this one, it must be a fault in the class.

But just recently, I started really reading the book and doing problems, and I realized that everything that the professor has been doing on the board makes perfect sense. It is just so convoluted that I can't follow it as he does it. But it makes sense. The motivation for each step becomes clear as one works through the actual problems, and sees what the difficulties are.

So I am brought to my conclusion. At some point, every student of physics is going to hit a point where just following along with the professor is pointless. They will hit a point where to learn anything, they must work through the problems themselves. But then, what is the purpose of the professor? I don't see how paying $40,000 a year to have someone assign you problems from a book is worth it.

What a bunch of shit. Whatever.