Keep Your Apple, Newton.
Today, my mom told me it would be a good idea if I brushed up on my physics skills to prepare for my next school year. After moaning and whining for about half of the day, I pulled my old and dusty physics book out and began reading. After about fifteen minutes, I was completely fed up.
The stupid thing about physics is that all of the stuff that it teaches you is point blank obvious. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction?” Gee, thanks Newton. Now when someone punches me in the face, as I fly backward I can thank you for all your wonderful insight. Physics is just overcomplicating things that you see every day in ordinary life. Like, Newton’s first law? “An object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.
” To me, it’s absolute idiocy, because yeah, sure, it’s true and all, but hey! Guess what, Mr. Newton? There’s this thing called friction, which means that all things stop eventually, which means that although in theory your law is completely valid, in day to day practice it is completely void. Don’t even get me started on the whole F=ma thing, and all the vector mumbo-jumbo. Like, really? If I want to figure out where a football is going to fly in a field, I’m not going to sit down with a notebook and take thirty minutes to add and subtract vectors and then come up with a final answer that’s probably wrong. I’m going to throw the freaking football. I guarantee you that if you went up to the average adult walking down the street and pointed to a physics problem in a high school textbook, they would not be able to solve it.
Because the average adult does not spend their days figuring out how fast a ball is going to go if you drop it off the side of a building. Of course, this is the part where the scornful adult tells me how important physics is. How I wouldn’t be typing on this laptop or watching TV if it weren’t for physics. To that, I can only say a resounding THANK YOU to all the people that subjected themselves to the absolute pain of pages and pages of intricate equations to give me the joy of a new episode of Glee every Tuesday at eight. But I’m sorry, out of every high school class, there is probably only one kid who actually is planning on becoming a physicist. There is no need to subject the rest of us to the pain of physics class.
I’m not denying that some part of physics is interesting. I like knowing things like why paper clips sink but huge cruise boats float. Physics is cool in that aspect, but I am in the firm belief that everything you will ever encounter in life has a relatively simple answer. It is entirely unnecessary to overcomplicate something with quadratic equations and trigonometric functions, because all you’re doing is making life hard for disgruntled, sleep deprived teenagers everywhere. So, I’m sorry Newton, but please. Keep your laws—and your apple—to yourself.
I’m sure I speak for many people when I say that I simply don’t need them.
