Problems with High School Physics - Sixty Symbols

Sixty Symbols regulars Ed Copeland, Tony Padilla and Phil Moriarty discuss their personal views on high school physics education in the UK.

This project features scientists from The University of Nottingham

Sixty Symbols videos by Brady Haran

A run-down of Brady's channels:

[ylefted]

Doing maths in physics was much easier than the actual subject. Giving the maths a meaning helped so much. It's not the physics that's the problem in my opinion, it's the way maths is taught.

[NathanLucas]

My high school physics teacher actually started out the class this year by stating "physics is a math class disguised as science".

[aniruddha]

I think students at school level should be taught about the importance of modern science. Most of the general public doesn't really understand the need for funding in science. So even if we can't teach them the actual intricacies of physics at least they'll know WHY is it important to study this stuff.

[XPimKossibleX]

The things on the whiteboard scare me, but then I think for a second and realise how much I want to learn and understand it.

[RexGalilae]

although I always will criticize my outdated Indian Teaching system to the end, I have to give credit to it for the way it presents Physics in grade 11 and 12 (basically a-level) which is great! It has all the "scary" math and calculus parts but it makes it all less scary and more fun by making us DERIVE all the physics equations before making us work on them.
it not only eliminates the need to memorize countless formulae, but it also gives us a deep intuition behind them, making us think the way scientists who developed those formulae did.
A-level physics and US Physics of the same level is very dull, by comparison, imo. But apart from that, they're still better

[ws_dev]

5:37 - From the entire video this is what I appreciated the most. It's an incentive to students who are just entering university and haven't seen yet some of the beautiful but difficult concepts involving physics and mathematics.

[princeistalri]

It's unfortunately all too true. Until I developed an interest in physics, I recall that I quite frankly didn't care for mathematics.

Oh, I could learn it ok, do some problems, etc., but at least partially due to American culture, I did not see the beauty in it, nor the intricacy with which math is intertwined with reality and how necessary it truly is.

[saxon]

The biggest reason people have a problem with maths in the context of physics is it is not often enough taught in concert with the theory. Comming from a background in engineering and taking a something like Fourier analysis I tried to understand it many times and failed until the theory as to how and why it worked was explained and how it works to give the result. Most people cannot fully understand maths as an abstract idea. One of my favourite units of study was physics and I blitzed the maths in it even though in general it's my weakest subject because we were lead to understand the maths befire we applied it, it was given meaning.

[alecmileman]

I'm a little annoyed that Phil didn't go into the higher tier papers and the last questions. The foundation paper is designed for people who cannot understand physics and will not go into college to learn physics let alone university. It's just a legal requirement to of taken science at GCSE.

[grimmerMD]

If I was introduced to even the general idea of things like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or Schrodinger's cat back in in elementary or highschool, I'm sure I would've taken an interest much earlier and actually taken math and physics in highschool. But it was as if they picked out all the fascinating parts of the topics and left in everything sure to put off 90% of students. Maybe it's different now; my 12 year old sister is learning about the structure of atoms and the wavelike properties of electrons, so already it seems much more exciting and less dry than much of what we did.

[stewarthills]

A level physics has become hard for me because I favour maths and the amount of maths in the course has been reduced

[RichardB]

I agree with the sentiments at 5:34. Actually, I think the GCSE standards ought to go up too. In GCSE maths, you spend months finding gradients of curves by drawing tangents on graph paper and then measuring the change in height by change in length. And finding areas under curves by summing trapeziums together. If I recall correctly, not once did we even discuss the possibility of making those trapeziums infinitessimally narrow or taking any limits, or anything resembling calculus. Certainly at higher tier GCSE, there ought to be a basic introduction to differentiation and integration. Then that gives you much more scope to introduce more mathematical rigour into the Physics A-level syllabus.

[beccasiciliano]

This is incredible. Thank you. I am in high school in the US and my school is not allowing us to have AP Physics C. 6 student, including myself, are fighting to have the class, but the school will have none of it. Thank you for showing us that we aren't crazy for wanting a higher level physics course. Especially since we are going to college in a year.

[emma-katestevenson]

I agree so much. Personally, I will never be a physicist or a mathematician - I’m studying classical music. But with some understanding of the fundamentals of these studies, it opens up a whole new world of my field. Once I began to really understand the sciences behind music, it not only made it so much easier to understand, but it made everything so much more beautiful and I developed such a sense of love and wonder for the way our universe works. And then sometimes I have a Musicianship exam in 8 hours and I’m watching a Sixty Symbols video from several years ago.

[davidgillies]

50% of my first year lectures were maths. In the first two weeks or so we were all brought up to speed on things like partial differentials and vector spaces and then off we went. By Christmas we were deriving orthonormal polynomials as solutions to partial differential equations. Then it was contour integration, and starting in on Green's, Gauss's and Stokes's theorems. It was pretty brutal. Second year QM was even worse.

[MichaelMedlock]

Can't agree more.  I remember taking chem in college, thinking the Bohr model was THE model of atoms.  I had never heard of wave functions, and frankly it confused the heck out of me.  I can remember being so frustrated because i am a science-minded kind of guy, and should not have been having so much difficulty at a concept in a 100 level course.  Of course, it wasn't the fact that it was truly complicated, it was just the fact i was trying to not only absorb and understand the actual purpose of the lecture, but on top of that, also re-imagine the entire structure of atoms at the same time.  Add to that the lack of math at the primary level, which also has to then be incorporated into the college level courses as though they go hand in hand (because they DO - we're just not taught that until it is almost too late). 

The Shakespeare example is perfect - i may not be an expert on Shakespeare, but i've read most of his plays, understand the contribution he made to literature, and thoroughly enjoy his stuff.  I may not be able to explain in detail WHY his plays were so special, but i do know know them and have gained an appreciation for his work.  Why is science and math treated differently?

[choicebarrelscrotes]

My high school teacher was an older guy, 75 or so. He was a former NASA scientist and university lecturer, and retired to high school in order to keep his brain active on a daily basis. He was a great teacher.

[TheRedKatar]

Even people in my AS Further Maths seem to be this way of feeling it's unimportant to not be able to understand maths so I would definitely agree that there is an underlying problem with how mathematics is viewed in general. For physics in particular, I would say that about 50% of my class would completely switch off when 'hard' maths came up.

[PaulaJBean]

This is why 90% of the Math and Physics students are now exchange students from abroad - from countries which still understand the importance of math instead of ridiculing it.

[RMutt-gwuz]

'if you're prepared to do it, you're going to be fine'
thank you for saying that. encouraged me a lot.