At home we had an old O-level mathematics (old British system, compulsory at age 16) book lying around. Two things stuck out: A massive amount of material: lots of calculus, matrices, complex numbers, group theory, ... And almost all of it explained extremely badly
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The O-level physics book we had lying around was even more brutal, far more physics than I ever learned in my life. Pretty sure the total content of my physics A-level (optional, age 18) would have been squashed into just a few pages of that
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To be fair, I took my exams at the low point in difficulty (towards the end of the Blair administration), after that they got harder again My physics A-level involved zero calculus. There's really very little physics you can do without any calculus at all
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Replying to @_julesh_
I thought a bit about "physics without calculus" recently and one important idea that came to mind was dimensional analysis (though this isn't emphasized nearly as much as it should be). After that I could only come up with a few toy examples which mostly consisted of ...
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Replying to @blockspins
I don't think we did any serious dimensional analysis Most of the course was stamp collecting, learning facts but not quantifying them.... and still somehow being structured so that we didn't have memorise lots of stuff
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Replying to @_julesh_
I think I first heard the idea in chemistry class (converting between moles and grams and whatnot) but then found it very helpful in checking memorized formulas in high school physics. I've always been impressed by the way that expert fluid mechanicians make use of it...
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More than one or two dimensionless parameters is already plenty for me, but they're often juggling 6 or 7!
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