I excel at calculus but struggle with great difficulty in my programming and physics classes.
My programming professor said that people with good "intuition" is the key to their ease in these subjects. They just know what to do. They're really good at finding solutions without much practice or memorization.
How do I increase my intuition if I was born with the intuition of a mule?
Learn the definition of intuition
>t.brainlet
Don't listen to these autists.
You gain intuition by
thinking about the topic in your head a lot. Once you have obsessed about it for a long amount of time then you just tend to have unconscious answers to questions that never became conscious, i.e intuition.
source;
I'm an expert on human intelligence.
Right now I just spent 3 hours reading in-depth a physics chapter about work and kinetic energy.
Things made sense, I understood everything. I had no doubts, and the explanations seemed almost obvious.
I try the homework and I get fucking ASS RAPED!
Why does this happen to me? Im desperate as fuck for someone to teach me this shit man
please help
What you need to do to build up your intuition is to study your class' material in such a way that the concepts feel natural. The largest hurdle in the way of this understanding are presenting the same concepts in different ways. If you can explain each concept in class, in your own (mental) drawings and your own words, and if you critically analyze your explanations, then your intuition will improve.
Yes of course.
The hardest part of physics is turns the words into math. However, do you even know what math you have to do?
Do you know the math, alone?
If so then keep trying, try and get different perspectives on it.
Physics isn't easy for anyone. It is only harder for some.
Well, user, I am taking calculus 1 alongside physics with calculus 1. Some equations require integrals, which I have yet to learn.
My calculus class is challenging, but I have the """"""""""""""""intuition""""""""" that makes it easy. I can just look at a math problem and know how to solve it. It's a sixth sense. This sixth sense clicked within me while I was taking college algebra and has helped me greatly since.
In physics, I am a sitting duck.
Yes, I shall keep trying as I need to pass this class.
Genetics, man. My best friend can solve these questions easily and he's not even taking physics currently.
Well apparently you need to stop lying to yourself, use some critical thinking cause right now you are setting off huge red flags.
If you read something, believe you understand it, but when it comes down to the rubber meeting the road with some flimsy homework problems, you are straight up delusional my man; there's no other way around this fact.
Wise the fuck up, or drop out -- cause you're brainded.
Also I came off as a little rude so I'll try to be nicer since you seem to be willing to put in the hard work and that's probably the most important thing; it's why I'm spending the time to type this.
I suggest not reading the chapter before starting the homework. Go as far as you can in the homework, and when you get stuck you must stop and force yourself to think and try to figure it out on your own for at least 15 minutes if not longer.
Your instinct will be to go to some chapter in the book. No no, that makes you dependent and a cheating pussy. You gotta use this time when you are stuck on a problem as an opportunity to think for yourself to expand your problem solving capabilities. You are in the process of figuring something out, or at the very least, priming yourself with confusion so that when you find the answer it will become assimilated into your common sense reasoning for the rest of your life.
These are the steps you gotta take so that your common sense is extended to being more than just bullshit memorization dependent on what other people write in books.
I honestly don't know what you are talking about. Physics intuition is really no different than math intuition, at least that's how it feels for me. I use the same intuition when solving physics problems that I use when solving math problems. As long as you understand the material and fundamental relationships, physics IS math.
Honestly though, how am I supposed to know the average change in kinetic energy is equal to the change in work?
That's not something I know unless I read it.
What color of underwear am I wearing?
How the fuck are you supposed to know?
Also, I am not delusional. I have a 3.9 GPA and have yet to get anything lower than an A- in any class.
I may have come off a little rude as well. I just tried a problem on my own and forced myself not to use Chegg and I got the right answer! It definitely helped more than just reading the answer and understanding the answer.
I thought so too. The math part where physics likes to combine and manipulate equations isn't hard. That's not hard at all.
What's hard is knowing what to do and what numbers to use and where and how.
I agree with this to some degree, but reading is necessary if you want to learn the material correctly. For example, OP could go about each problem incorrectly and think his logic and intuition is sound, even though some scientific results are completely opposite common sense intuition. Or, he may spend more time then what's necessary solving problems. A simple example is writing out a sample space for a probability problem instead of just using the formula for combinations or permutations. Sure, it's memorization, but it's simplifying the whole procedure and in essence it's no different, just a clever shorthand. I agree he should be trying to solve problems on his own, but sometimes when doing homework even when I'm staring at the solution manual it doesn't click unless I've actually read the chapter.
>tfw too smart to be intuitive
>Honestly though, how am I supposed to know the average change in kinetic energy is equal to the change in work?
That's the work-energy theorem.
dW = F dx
dx/dt = v => dx = v dt
dW = Fv dt
E = K + V = 1/2mv^2 + V
dE/dv = mv = p
F = dp/dt = ma
Fv = mav = pa = dE/dv a
dW = dE/dv a dt
dv/dt = a => dv = a dt
dW = dE/dv dv
dW = dE
Yes but assuming I don't read the book like user said, how am I supposed to know that alone?
Obviously, you try to relate work to energy in some way, so you do some math, and it comes out like that.
>so you do some math, and it comes out like that.
No, wtf. Why in hell would you take the derivative of energy with respect to velocity? I'm not that user, but this is exactly the kind of intuition problem he's asking for help about.
Now that I've said that, I never actually realized that momentum is just dE/dv. Maybe I'm just a terrible physicist. It certainly seems like a fundamental relationship I was talking about in this post .
OP here. How am I supposed to just do some math? That's the equivalent of the "draw the whole owl" meme.
I was talking about the fact that:
W = 1/2mv2^2 - 1/2mv1^2
will give you work it took to get to that velocity with that mass starting from that velocity.
>Now that I've said that, I never actually realized that momentum is just dE/dv
Neither did I (though that's only valid if your potential doesn't vary with velocity, otherwise I should've simply used K, so the relation dK/dv = p is what actually holds).
I just wanted to show the relations between them, so I have two things to work with
K = 1/2mv^2
dW = F dx
plus some secondary relationships
F = dp/dt = ma
So I can try, either integrate the second equation, or derive the first (because one of the equations involves derivatives) and see what that gives me, since I didn't want to write integrals, I went with the first.
Deriving that gave me dE/dv = mv, which happens to be momentum, so I know I am not completely off here, since F = dp/dt
So I just need to related these somehow.
So I go back to the second equation, a first try leads me to write F = dp/dt = d^2E/dvdt, but that's a pain in the ass, so I instead try rewriting dt, which gives me Fv dt, so I just substitute the equation for with an invariant mass, ma, so I get mav, which is pa.
Now it looks like we're almost there, so I substitute p for dE/dv, and dv for a dt, so it cancels out with the a dt on top, but that's needless complexity, so I instead substitute a dt for dv, giving the relation you see on the post.
It's not different than solving other physics problems, there's many times that while studying physics, you get questions that ask you to write such types of relationships.
So you have to look at what you have and kind of stumble around and see where that leads you.