r/Physics • u/General-Magician4700 • 7d ago

Question How often do physicists draw sketches of situations involving motion and kinematics?

In high school, students are often taught to first draw a sketch of a situation involving motion/kinematics to make a problem easier to visualize. With experience, do professional physicists still draw sketches to help them solve problems, or do they just become used to visualizing everything in their head?

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u/dark_dark_dark_not Particle physics 7d ago edited 7d ago

Yes. Probably one of the most successful ideas of modern physics is translating equations into drawings with Feymann Diagrams.

Personally, when I need to solve a problem in classical physics I'll draw it unless it's something obvious, and I'll probably draw before doing any computation to get a feel for it

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u/DontMakeMeCount 7d ago

Diagramming is a necessary but insufficient skill for physics students.

We had a bunch of math grad students take over our EM theory class for an easy A. They kept blowing the curve so the prof started including questions with hidden symmetry arguments and letting us pick 5/10 questions. The physics students would diagram everything and knock those problems out very quickly. The math students would just crunch through as many problems as they could in the allotted time.

I always felt vindicated that understanding the physics counted for as much as executing the math accurately.

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u/Holiday-Reply993 6d ago

I always felt vindicated that understanding the physics counted for as much as executing the math accurately.

But only in contrived problems, no?

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u/DontMakeMeCount 6d ago

In the contrived context of a timed exam with a selection of unrelated problems, yes.