Over a year ago, I did a problem for my Eletricity and Magnetism course, and thought it was so cool that I wrote about it on my blog. It was a nifty problem: given a sphere of charge Q with radius R, find the repulsive force each half of the sphere exerts on the other half. I remember puzzling over this one for a while before finding a solution. I thought it was so cool, I wanted to write a bit about it. When we went over the problem in class, I realizd I’d a simple mistake (no surprise there) in the problem. I never bothered to correct my blog becuase I’m lazy like that.
Fast forward to just a few days ago, when some guy finds this problem and links to it on his blog. He says he thinks it’s a neat problem, but is puzzled because i say the answer is “obviously” something incorrect. I put the “obvious” line in there as a joke, because it was a hard problem. The day after this guy linked to my post, I switched servers, which invalidated the link he put up to my blog. I finally got this all figured out, and replaced the entry with a note that I did the problem wrong and posted a link to a correct solution.
The neat part of all this is that my blog is apparently the first result google comes up with when you search for “cool physics problem.”
I tried working out the problem just now, and realized I’ve forgotten a lot of the stuff I learned in E&M. I thought the class was kind of neat, but it really wasn’t my bag. It reminds me, yet again, why I love comptuer science so much more than physics. I can jump right in to work I left off several years ago when it comes to computer science theory, but I’ll be damned if I can do a physics problem I would have known how to solve just over a year ago. It seems to me that comptuer science is just so much easier than physics, and that’s why I like it more.