NAPS Intermediate Physics

“God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli

These lessons are the basis for the intermediate physics course at the Naval Academy Preparatory School for the 2021-2022 academic year. I hope you find them a valuable and fruitful resource as you are going through the class. In particular, the web-based material includes many opportunities to practice your skills in Python programming, which will be a fundamental part of the course.

One of the most valuable skills you will ever develop is to learn how to learn. Part of this is actively confronting the material you are trying to master, and question your understanding of this as much as possible. Traditionally, this involves doing practice problems, and checking to make sure you get the right answer. However, with the advent of computers, there is a different possibility: that of trying to teach what you are learning to the computer! It sounds like a cliche, but over my many years, I have discovered that the best way to learn is to teach. This is one of the primary reasons I have structured these lessons to be interactive; you will increase your own understanding of this material by writing it in Python code. Keep this in mind as you go through this material: the more you actively do with these lessons, the more you will learn, and the longer you will remember it.

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1. Introduction to Python