Priscilla_Anne
more space for everyone
Hello Pandadude;
I can appreciate the kind of interest you have in Physics. I love the concepts of Physics involved in orbits. It is truly fun to understand them from an energy and momentum perspective; to know what any particular direction of thrust will do to your orbit and flying "by the seat of your pants" using that understanding. That's really why I love orbiter so much. I was always fascinated by orbits. The very first program I wrote was in fortran and it was the calculation and plotting of an orbit from the initial position and velocity vectors. I found it fascinating that just specifying where the object is at and the speed and direction in 3-D space it is moving at that moment COMPLETELY determine the orbit it will have.
I taught Physics at a community college for 17 years. I wish I could say that the kind of exploration of the subject you want can be found in college courses, but if there are any such, they are very rare. What others here have said is true; that Physics courses are highly oriented towards just "doing the math." One gal here said when you are throwing a ball you are doing Physics. She's right in the sense that our brains develop an intuitive understanding of how the universe works (on the size scale of our experiences) and we can become experts at making things move the way we want them to and do the things we want them to do. But Physics as a subject is really the mathematical representation and conceptualization of these real-world things we do. Physics takes reality and tries to represent it in two languages, the language of mathematics and the language of words. It's quite a challenge to take all of reality and try to represent it using only those two domains. That's the problem with Physics as a subject really, because very very few people can make much use of let alone full use of what our brains intuitively know about how things work in the real world and put that kind of understanding and wisdom into equations and words. I have always wondered if that is really the right direction to go when trying to really grok this universe.
My biggest complaint about graduate school Physics was that there was very little discussion about what the equations mean. One of our books in fact expected us, the students to prove every assertion made in the book, instead of elaborating on what we were supposed to be learning. Okay I just wasn't brilliant enough to be a theoretical physicist, but neither were most of my peers. It was expected that the math would speak to us by itself and would tell us everything. I was very good at the mathematics of Physics but really understanding the significance of everything in the equations comes only slowly for even most of those who can handle the math. When I taught the depth of my understanding increased wonderfully over the years. I could talk to my students and get them thinking about what the equations meant and why they had the form they had. And what assumptions underlie any equation we used. But you won't find that in very many Physics courses, and you especially won't find it in Physics grad school courses.
So, do think twice about how you want to pursue your interest in these things.
I find it interesting to read what some of the highly experienced orbiter pilots here say about orbits and how to navigate around. Many of them have developed quite a sophisticated grasp of what to do and how it works. Sometimes I get an interesting alternative view from reading descriptions people here have written. (I can't give you a reference because I read these things a few years ago and have not been here much lately, but most of it was in some of the tutorials that people have written about getting into orbit and then changing the orbit to get to the moon and that sort of thing. Some of them I think have even learned some of the mathematics involved just from being involved with orbiter and being so interested. You may find the people who fly orbitersim to be some of the best sources of the kind of understanding you wish to have.
So if you do not pursue a formal education in Physics, you might make orbiter your teaching tool and see what you can learn by flying. I bet if you really think about what happens as you fire your thrusters while in orbit, you can come up with some great questions. The answers that people here give to those questions may give you what you are looking for.
Curiosity and fascination breath life into life.
