The Yummy Chewy Center

This is a thought about the purpose of learning high-school physics, and an attempt to answer the question of "why do i need to learn this crap?"

Many elements of the physics curriculum can seem to be pointless, knowledge for its own sake, which is a terrible argument for high school students, or probably most people (when it's in a field that they *haven't* identified as their life's work). My feeling is that physics (and possibly some other disciplines) is like a tootsie roll pop. There a lot of vaguely interesting elements to be learned, and you keep going since you're already in it, and then all of a sudden you get to the yummy chewy center, and you remember that this was the reason you took the wrapper off the sucker in the first place.

In physics, the chewy center is the feeling of being a bad-ass. You look out upon the world and everything you can see is something you understand the dynamics of, how it moves, why it moves.

Lots of people can do this though, whether they've taken physics or not.

In physics, the chewy center is that knowledge that even though you may only have figured the height of that tree to the nearest 10 feet, you did it with nothing in your hands but air. You could tell someone roughly how much that bus weighs, and how many SUV's it would obliterate if it fails to brake properly.

Lots of people can do this, whether they've taken physics or not.

In physics, the chewy center is that knowledge that if you chose to pick up a calculator and a pencil, you change from a reasonably smart, observant person into a magician, who can look at the shadow of a tree at noon on a summer day and tell someone what their longitude and latitude is. You could be the person that tells the bus driver exactly how much space they need to leave in order to avoid obliterating those SUVs.

Nobody can do this, without learning the concepts we teach in physics.

So if you want to have a choice someday, whether to push that magician button or not, then strap on that pointy hat and grab your tootsie roll pop.