Saturday, May 19, 2007

Hockey Player Blames Physics

Even when physics isn't involved, it STILL gets the blame.

This hockey player has
this excuse for his punishment:

"It's a nothing play if Robbie doesn't hit him," Pronger said, stressing that he did not intentionally hit Holmstrom in the head. The contact, he said, was partly because he is 6-foot-6 and Holmstrom is 6-foot-1. Of course I'm going to hit him in the head," Pronger said. "He's quite a bit shorter than me. It's just law of physics."


Er... Hello, Mr. Einstein, I think you probably have had several hits on the head as well. The fact that you are taller and will hit someone on the head has nothing to do with physics, but rather it has everything to do with GEOMETRY, as in Mathematics!

In one of the chapters in my essay "So You Want To Be A Physicist", I mentioned the fact that for many intro physics students, many of them actually have more of a problem with the mathematics than they do with the physics. When they try to tackled a physics problem, they often get stuck somewhere, and then blame physics for being "difficult". I've seen many instances where the students actually are not well-prepared mathematically, and therefore, they got stuck with the mathematics, often with basic trigonometry. But most don't realize this, so they attribute the difficulty to physics.

Physics can be tough, sure. But it will become impossible if you don't have the tools (mathematics) to use.

Zz.

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