Bow and Arrow
In physics you always feel like an idiot.
Always the bottom of the class, always the gnawing anxiety that you’re a failure because you can’t slap a six variable equation onto the page. Always the miserable red “x”s that coat a midterm of final showing you just how little you understand in the grand scheme of the universe.
Don’t get me wrong I like physics, I’m majoring in it after all, but I have a nagging sense of doubt. I don’t know if I can keep up with my peers. Every low grade and every question in lecture adds mass to the rock settling low in my stomach.
I don’t belong here.
Every low grade every failure every single instance of sheer I-don’t-have-a-shit-clue-what’s-going-on agony. When you sit in a lecture and miss every …show more content…
Great combination.
It’s also why when I consume any form of fiction I obsess over the physical possibility of the situation. Did you know that the spaceship in “2001 a Space Odyssey” isn’t spinning fast enough to produce artificial gravity equivalent to that of the earth? Or that over the course of the 1996 Justice League of America comics Batman would have dislocated his shoulder forty three times while using his grapple?
If I can’t keep up with the rest of my field I might as well tear apart other people’s work.
And ten pages of calculations and five or six simulations only took a few hours. The time I spent in tears over the blank pages and unsolved problems totaled several orders of magnitude more than any pursuits of fancy. If I can’t be my heroes I can analyze their every …show more content…
I could drone on for years about my childhood superhero crush but all you need to know is that he’s a modern day Robin Hood who uses a bow and arrow to fight crime. And that he got a television show in late 2012.
While watching the newest episode I thought about how much recoil a bow would have. Certainly it had to be less than a gun, or even Batman’s grapple for that matter. Not only that, but he can take shots while in free space (aka jumping off things) so if there is a recoil it would push him backwards.
Armed with my trusty white board and a fitting green marker I set to prove my point.
To spare the details I arrived at the conclusion that the springiness of the bow and bow string actually absorbed any recoil from the arrow, thus proving my original hypothesis wrong. I worked the problem on my own and came to a conclusion as I did a hundred times before. I’d never know if it was correct, just a break in the monotony of graded material that decides my future.
Weeks of midterms passed and low on sleep, soda, and confidence I called a friend.
While ranting about the new comic I started, I remembered he studied archery.
In the middle of a sentence I changed
In physics you always feel like an idiot.
Always the bottom of the class, always the gnawing anxiety that you’re a failure because you can’t slap a six variable equation onto the page. Always the miserable red “x”s that coat a midterm of final showing you just how little you understand in the grand scheme of the universe.
Don’t get me wrong I like physics, I’m majoring in it after all, but I have a nagging sense of doubt. I don’t know if I can keep up with my peers. Every low grade and every question in lecture adds mass to the rock settling low in my stomach.
I don’t belong here.
Every low grade every failure every single instance of sheer I-don’t-have-a-shit-clue-what’s-going-on agony. When you sit in a lecture and miss every …show more content…
Great combination.
It’s also why when I consume any form of fiction I obsess over the physical possibility of the situation. Did you know that the spaceship in “2001 a Space Odyssey” isn’t spinning fast enough to produce artificial gravity equivalent to that of the earth? Or that over the course of the 1996 Justice League of America comics Batman would have dislocated his shoulder forty three times while using his grapple?
If I can’t keep up with the rest of my field I might as well tear apart other people’s work.
And ten pages of calculations and five or six simulations only took a few hours. The time I spent in tears over the blank pages and unsolved problems totaled several orders of magnitude more than any pursuits of fancy. If I can’t be my heroes I can analyze their every …show more content…
I could drone on for years about my childhood superhero crush but all you need to know is that he’s a modern day Robin Hood who uses a bow and arrow to fight crime. And that he got a television show in late 2012.
While watching the newest episode I thought about how much recoil a bow would have. Certainly it had to be less than a gun, or even Batman’s grapple for that matter. Not only that, but he can take shots while in free space (aka jumping off things) so if there is a recoil it would push him backwards.
Armed with my trusty white board and a fitting green marker I set to prove my point.
To spare the details I arrived at the conclusion that the springiness of the bow and bow string actually absorbed any recoil from the arrow, thus proving my original hypothesis wrong. I worked the problem on my own and came to a conclusion as I did a hundred times before. I’d never know if it was correct, just a break in the monotony of graded material that decides my future.
Weeks of midterms passed and low on sleep, soda, and confidence I called a friend.
While ranting about the new comic I started, I remembered he studied archery.
In the middle of a sentence I changed