A New School Year

As a new school year opens it is timely to start a conversation on the fundamentals for successful learning in physics and mathematics. Many students say "I do not understand physics" or "I cannot do maths". What can be done to remedy this? The solution is to go back to basics and pursue steady step by step practice in each subject with regular testing. If a test reveals that a physics concept is not understood or a mathematical technique is not correctly applied then we zoom in on this area and practice it again until it is mastered. Learning involves dialogue between teacher and student with encouragement to aspire to new levels. This is the heart of education. The tutorial method had its origins with Socrates in ancient Greece and is followed today at the best universities in the world. The journey to academic success comes when students embark on a regular program of study and revision and the best time to start the journey is now.

A Boy Playing on the Sea-Shore......

To Physicists and Mathematicians this title invokes images of one person. Isaac Newton. In a farm house in Colsterworth near Grantham in Lincolnshire the principles of natural philosophy were born. Newton's central problem was this: Given that the path of a planet about the Sun is an ellipse and that the radius vector from the Sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, what must the law of attraction be? 

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I have only been like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me