Saturday, November 20, 2010

I Tackle Physics

I haven't posted for a while, and in that time I decided to ditch the study of religion in favour of studying science, specifically, physics.

I gave up on religion because whatever religion you are checking out, its followers expect you to accept whatever they say as truth. On further investigation you find out that what they say doesn't agree with their own Holy Books because most of them haven't even read them. And yet they teach.

Surely the study of science is going to be way less frustrating. So I went and bought myself Physics Workbook for Dummies, by Steven Holzner, PhD because I figured that way I could start right from the beginning and work my way up.

First section is measurements and conversions. Straight forward right? No way you could disagree with the stuff that's at the most basic beginning right?

Well, I was wrong. I've only gotten to page 15 and I've already found 3 errors. Heaven knows how many there are going to be when I get to the more advanced section.

For instance, on page 12 it says that 1 meter is 39.37 inches. But when they calculate how many inches in two meters, they tell you the answer is 78.6. So obviously they rounded it down to 39.3, though any 4rth grader could tell you that you should round up if the last digit is a 7. Besides, they never said you should round. That's in the next lesson. So the correct answer, is 78.74, not 78.6 which they said. But hey, that's a minor thing compared to this question:

Question 15. How many centimeters in a kilometer? For those of you who aren't metric, there are 100 cm in a meter and a thousand meters in a kilometer, so the answer should be 100,000, or 1.0 x 10 to the power of 5. However, the answer they give is 1.0 to 10 to the power of -5, or 0.00001. Hey, they are only wrong by a factor of 10,000,000,000!