The material is designed to help you improve your:

(1) Inquiry skills.

(2) Techniques for carrying out an experiment and processing and the analysing your results.

(3) Knowledge of scientific language used to describe our physical world.

(4) Understanding of our physical world.

(5) Appreciation of science as a human endeavour.

(6) Study and problem solving skills.

(7) Knowledge of the role that science has played in many technological developments that have occurred.

Physics attempts to describe and understand the nature and behaviour of the physical world around us in a fundamental and penetrating way as possible. With this knowledge physicists can make prediction about what may happen in certain situations.

For example, a person was found dead at the bottom of a cliff – did the person jump or were they throw? By making careful measurements and performing a number of experiments, it is possible using a few simple physical principles to decide if the person committed suicide or was murdered.

It is often mistakenly believed that physics deals with indisputable facts and absolute truths. Although the facts are usually indisputable, they are incomplete and since we never know all the facts about a situation we can only develop theories that are only an approximation to the truth.

Newtonian mechanics is quite adequate to describe the motion of objects that are moving relatively slowly and that is all that is needed to predict the path of a golf ball or a satellite. However, this theory breaks down and does not describe the motion of objects travelling at speeds comparable to the speed of light. For objects travelling at speeds approaching the speed of light, we need to use Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity.

Our present theories are only approximation to the truth. Physics is an evolving subject in which theories are modified or new theories introduced to give models that approach closer and closer to the truth but never quite attaining it.

Mobile phones, computers, tablets, high definition television, etc, etc, would not exist without our understanding of the world through the study of physics – one can easily justify the claim that the physics as a discipline is “man’s greatest intellectual achievement”.

The secret of being good at physics, is to be able to visualize a physical situation and then applying physical principles.

VISUAL PHYSICS: Memory plays an important role in being good at physics. Throughout the notes on this website there are many images. It is easy to remember a picture whereas it is difficult to recall words.

When processing the notes, take time to imprint many of the pictures into your brain. It them becomes easy to attach words to the stored image. In your examinations, it is easy to recall the images and then fill in the words.