PFE004: Inspiration

My inspiration for this crazy line of reasoning came from a lot of different things.

First, I realized that I was explaining a lot of really cool, but sometimes kind of hard to explain things to people of all different knowledge levels on a regular basis and repeatedly. I needed to organize my explanations.

In school you're supposed to learn physics and things, but I've also learned about myself. I've found that I like learning about how speakers work, what happens if$$q_e\neq q_p$$or efficient means of trapping energy from the sun. These aren't necessarily the sorts of things that will be covered in a typical lecture setting, but I still love finding out about them, and the satisfaction is overwhelming.

The thing that made me start to organize this is an instance of my first regular webcomic (and still is my firefox homepage). It makes you ask, how much explanation is enough? Baking soda+vinegar=bubbles. Is that enough? What should a "lay person" know about the wacky physics phenomena that go around him/her every day?

I often hear that people have a natural drive to understand the world around them. I know I do, as well as anyone else involved in physics. There's no other reason to do physics. But is this true of everyone? From my experiences, categorically no. People do not want to know what's going on around them, in my observations.

Are people just apathetic? Or is something else going on? Certainly there is a large apathy factor. Not just laziness, but a true desire to not know, to not cloud one's mind. But I think if that were the only factor, curiosity would still win out in many more people than it seems to.

The other reason for the lack of intense curiosity on "how the world works" stems from how complicated it all is. Not just complicated but counterintuitive. The sitting in a computer chair holding a spinning bike wheel thing still blows my mind every time (if you don't know, watch this). I can do the equations, and even expect it to happen, but when I sit there and grab the wheel and turn it, and I turn, I just about lose it. My body is totally unprepared for the crazy phenomena. So it seems that our internal "physics awareness module" failed to load when humans were invented. For some this just heightens the mystery. For others, it looks like a mountain too big to climb.

That's inspiration.