Science can be very interesting! I look forward to getting to know everyone over the year, and I hope we can all learn a lot!

Feel free to contact me with questions or feedback. If you don't have my Remind code, I can be reached at: bradley.knockel@aps.edu

You can communicate in person, and I do check my email periodically. Of course, in an emergency, you may call Sandia High at (505) 294-1511.

Parents, please email me to be on my Remind list (or get the class code from your student)! This is how I communicate with students and parents (or website).

In any science class, it is important that you do not fall behind and put in lots of time and effort (especially in physics!). In the busy chaos called life, you must come to class and keep up with the homework and with readings!

Feel very free to ask me questions during and after class! Don't let something you don't understand stay that way. Look over your notes after every class to make sure that you understand everything. Regular practice is key, so keep reading and asking/answering questions until you feel comfortable.

Regardless of what you do with your life, learning how to think scientifically will help you, and many employers in this modern world like seeing science experience. Organizing detail, solving problems, thinking carefully, and thinking abstractly will help you in every part of life, especially when using computers, using money, using tools/machines, voting, or planning a work event. When you get a new job or your job replaces the old system with a new one, you will be able to learn the new system quickly if you can become good at applying what you already know to real problems, which is a skill that science develops. This type of thinking only adds to what you can do and does not replace it. The real world needs diverse skills (for example, scientific research needs creativity and communication skills!). Many years from now, when you have forgotten much of what you have learned in this class, your thinking skills will remain. These skills may not be more important than the communication skills that help us build relationships with each other, but they are important.

Physics

Physics is the study of, well, everything! It is all around us. Physics explains the motion of a rocket and the motion of Newton's cradle (in the image below), but it also describes riding a bicycle, flying an airplane, and driving a car. Even the sound we hear, the air we breathe, and the light we see are all understood through physics. Every atom is described by physics!

Understanding how the universe works is both easy and hard.

At first, it is really hard. When dropped from the same height at the same time, how is it possible that a bowling ball hits the ground at the same time as a basketball? How is it possible that both ends of a tug-of-war rope have the same force regardless of who is winning? How is it possible that orbiting astronauts who appear weightless are actually experiencing most (88%) of the gravity that we on the Earth's surface experience? How is it possible that the entire Earth (and you right now) are moving 30 kilometers every second around the Sun? How is it possible that, right now, every square inch of your body has 15 pounds of force pushing on it? The actual way the universe works is different from what we naively think before taking a physics class. Learning to think about things in the correct way is hard, and we often have to ignore common sense.

But! Once we understand what is actually going on, physics is no longer difficult because most things can be explained by just one or two laws of physics!