26 Preliminaries
then you are going to have toaddto the burden of learning physics per se the burden of learning,
or re-learning, all of the basic mathematics that would have permitted you to answer them easily.
These are not idly selected examples, either; they are all things youwill have to in fact do early and
oftenin this course!
My strongadviceto you, if you are now feeling the cold icy grip of panic because in fact you are
signed up for physics using this book and you couldn’t answeranyof these questions, is to drop the
course and go study math until you really master it,thencome back and take physics. Seriously
dude (or dudess). Or resign yourself to a life of misery and enormously hard work just to pass.
Don’t go blaming the course, the teacher, this textbook, or anybody but yourself if you proceed
unprepared and then fail or suffer – You Have Been Warned.
So, what if you could doalmostall of these short problems (and can at the very least remember
the tools, like the Quadratic Formula, that you weresupposed to use to solve them if you could
remember them? What if you have no choice but to take physics now,and are just going to have to
do your best and relearn the math as required along the way? What ifyou did in fact understand
math pretty well once upon a time and are sure it won’t bemuchof an obstacle, but you really
would like a review, a summary, a listing of the things you need to know someplace handy so you can
instantly look them up as you struggle with the problems that uses the math it contains? What if you
are (or were)really goodat math, but want to be able to look at derivations or reread explanations
to bring stuff you learned right back to your fingertips once again?
For all of these latter cases, for students of the course in general, I provide the following online
(free!) book:Mathematics for Introductory Physics. It is located here:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/∼rgb/Class/mathforintrophysics.phpIt is a work in progress, and is quite possibly still somewhat incomplete, but it should help you
with a lot of what you are missing, and if you letmeknow what you are missing that you didn’t
find there, I can work to add it!
I would strongly advise all students of introductory physics (any semester) to visit this siteright
nowand bookmark it or download the PDF, and to visit the site from time totime to see if I’ve
posted an update. It is on my back burner, so to speak, until I finish the actual physics texts
themselves that I’m working on, but I will still add things to them as motivated by my own needs
teaching courses using this series of books.
Summary
That’s enough preliminary stuff. At this point, if you’ve read all of this“week”’s material and vowed
to adopt the method of three passes in all of your homework efforts, if you’ve bookmarked the math
help or downloaded it to your personal ebook viewer or computer, ifyou’ve realized that your brain
is actually something that you canhelp and enhancein various ways as you try to learn things, then
my purpose is well-served and you are as well-prepared as you can beto tackle physics.
Homework for Week
Problem 1.
Skim read this entire section (Week 0: How to Learn Physics), then read it like a novel, front to