Don’t kid yourself, just because you got the correct numerical answer to a problem is not justification that you understand the physics of the problem. You must understand all the logical steps in arriving at that solution or you have gained nothing, right answer or not.
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
My physics teacher is always sure to clarify which parts of a problem are physics and which are math. Physics is usually the part that allows you to set up the math.
My old physics professor David Newton (yes, apparently that’s the name he was born with) on how to study physics.
--Some AI Koans, collected by ESR
My physics teacher is always sure to clarify which parts of a problem are physics and which are math. Physics is usually the part that allows you to set up the math.