No one told me that it would be this hard to grasp basic physics without yet understanding the basic math. They made me change my math because I wouldn’t have been able to understand the math I wanted to take without the course I’m in now, but they didn’t say anything about how difficult it would be to jump straight into phys 1 without having already mastered the math I’m currently taking at the same time.
This is going to be a very difficult few months. I’m not at all sure I’ll be able to pull this off. On Thursday I sat in my very first physics class, completely understanding the concept of everything I was being told, but not being able to verify or back it up with the appropriate math. I felt so stupid at the end of that lesson that I had to sit down with A Brief History of Time when I got home, which makes me feel smart because it doesn’t have any math in it, and, as I said, I get the concepts, I get the idea of it all.
I thought that maybe when I sat down with my homework on my own and tried to think it through, I would understand what I was doing, but it didn’t really work out that way. I’ve just spent about an hour labouring my way through two tasks from my book, trying to calculate speed and acceleration, and trying to read the same things off a graph. Is there some kind of trick for calculating seconds into minutes and seconds? Cause if I try to turn 400 seconds into minutes, I get 6.666666667, 6 being 6 minutes, but how many seconds is .666666667 minutes?
I want to understand this. I want to feel smart, but right now I just feel like a stupid kid who doesn’t understand anything at all.
The flat’s a mess. We haven’t cleaned the kitchen in a week, and the living room is full of empty take-out boxes, cause we’re hardly ever home at the same time to clean up together the way we usually do, or have dinner together.
I feel like everything’s crashing. I’m falling to bits. I want to understand all this stuff, but I can’t, and I just sit and stare at the page, willing it to make sense, and it just doesn’t. None of it does.
6 Comments
400 seconds = 6,6…7 minutes
6 minutes = 360 seconds
400 seconds – 360 seconds = 40 seconds
400 seconds = 6 minutes 40 seconds
Defn of units – h for Hours, m for Minutes and s for Seconds. 9 to represent 0 or more places of decimals.
That pretty much says it all for s.9 to m:ss.9.
IME you really want to convert time to h.9 or s.9 for most purposes though, depending on units. If you’re dealing in terrestrial travel, it’s likely that your base units will be miles or kilometers per hour, or feet (possibly yards or inches) or meters (all other SI units of length are derived from meters) per second.
So for 4400s to H:M:S, first divide by 3600 (seconds in an hour) to get decimal hours getting 1.2(recurring) hours.
To get M, multiply the decimal part of 1.2(recurring) by 60, giving 13.3(recurring) minutes for 1:13.3(recurring) hours and decimal minutes.
To get S, multiply the decimal part of 13.3(recurring) by 60, giving 20s.
To get from H:M:S to H.9, it’s H + M*60 + S*3600.
I hope that convertions betwwen H:M and H.9 are obvious!
See, that made zero sense to me, especially the 9 thing… Morten’s method is more suited to my skill level, I should think.
See, the problem is, in math I haven’t even started second degree equations yet. I sat in physics class today, trying to calculate the rate of a falling ball, and was all “herp, 4.905x^2 times what now? derp…” My teacher started talking about deriving, and I nearly broke into tears. I literally spent my break crying in the bathroom, it was horrible. Came back with new determination, though, and got my teacher to explain in simpler terms what I was supposed to do, and I still don’t really get WHY the formulas work, but at least I can get them to, you know, work.
Ok, if you e-mail it back to me asking more specific questions than saying “I don’t understand this” I’ll try to expand. It was intended to build on Morten’s comment, to give you a set of tools for converting H:M:S etc into decimal hours, and/or into seconds and vice versa, and not to be read in isolation.
na… you just need some time to adjust
and if physics doesn’t work out, cant you change your coarse? like, you tan take, potions (ahem… chemistry) and become Snape!!!
Firstly, I don’t think I can do that now that I’ve started; I will have missed stuff in the beginning. Secondly, it’s physics I need. I want to study physics at uni next year. So something else isn’t really an option at this point. If I drop out, there will be nothing else to start with.