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Hey kids, why not fizz-icks?
To the editor:
Hey high-schoolers and college kids,
Why not Fizz-icks (sometimes written Physics)? It's fun. Almost all male physicists are still kids inside (I cannot speak for the female physicists). Guy physicists are always playing with balls, spinning toys, levers, toy cars, etc. Anything that moves can be used to represent the law of physics. (Do not be afraid of moving objects in the physics lab because they have been rendered safe from nuclear events -- now and in the past.)
I was guilty of taking a group of introductory "fizzycists" out into the H. Claude Bush Honor plaza -- you know, the one with the big clock -- taking meter sticks and stop watches while their brilliant professor (me) took a tennis racket and hit tennis balls upward. We did this study of velocity and gravitational acceleration for perhaps 25 to 30 minutes. We did get a number of fascinated onlookers to observe if we were doing it right. I don't know if the "Fizz-icks" class enjoyed it as much as I did. I do know that I enjoyed grading their experiment much more than they did creating it.
Since physics is the study of almost everything -- from Astronomy to subatomic particles -- the areas of study are endless. This is what appealed to me as I was graduating from the USAF in 1964. I could study anything. Wow.
I returned to The University of Tennessee in February of 1964 and I quickly began to understand that I could not party all night and be ready to answer technical questions, with any chance of being even slightly correct, at 8 a.m. the next morning. So I studied harder, received majors in electrical engineering, mathematics and physics and to make a couple of extra bucks, I worked for the nuclear lab as an electrician. I was inducted into Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society, and Sigma Pi Sigma, the physics honor society as an undergraduate. This was quite a change from the younger man who was unceremoniously kicked out in the late 1950s. The University of Tennessee knew what they were doing when they did it, however. I needed to calm down and get to work. Thanks, Air Force.
Getting back to the subject, go ahead and take a physics course of study and enjoy the rest of your life as one who took a long look at the surrounding universe -- large and small -- and found it interesting. In order to get this ball rolling, just demand that you can sign up for a physics course at your local training establishment and don't take no for an answer. I need someone to discuss some ideas with.