A lot of these classes hide the real work and wind up being too fluffy and easy.
If you really want to know physics well, make sure that by the end of this semester you've gone through a good chunk of the Feynman Lectures On Physics, learned enough calculus and linear algebra to survive those, and still have interest in seeing what comes next. Right now I'd guess that most of your work is plugging numbers into formulas... physics isn't accounting with rocks, it's the process of figuring out why these things work.
EDIT: I should give a bit more detail than this. Basic, less-technical physics introductions have a place - starting out in a field, you'll need more motivation and guidance and some find that the technical things get in the way. The real turning point is when you're past that struggle... it's one thing to be told that a baseball flying through the air will be described roughly by a quadratic equation in height and a linear function in distance, and another entirely to start from scratch and see why that's the case. Physics can be incredibly difficult, but it's not impossible. If you are finding the mathematics-heavy stuff more palatable by thinking about it in physical terms, use that to your advantage (I first really learned calculus from the aforementioned Feynman texts) and get ready to stop accepting any answer without asking several layers of 'Why the hell does that work?' to see where the real work comes in.
EDIT 2: At every other opportunity I tend to offer whatever help I can give, so I might as well throw that in here, too... I have to know a good chunk of physics for various icky reasons (advanced mathematics studies in fields that interact frequently with theoretical physics, for example) and if you have *any* physics questions at all then feel free to ask in any way you find convenient - if I can't answer anything you throw at me, I can find someone who can in a very short period of time, and if you get bored I can load you down with more reading material than most people ever willingly endure in their entire lives. I don't mean to sound like I'm dismissing any possible special abilities that you may be finding, so if you're looking to get serious then send me a message and I'll do all I can to make your physics studies easier than mine were.
Jeff
If you really want to know physics well, make sure that by the end of this semester you've gone through a good chunk of the Feynman Lectures On Physics, learned enough calculus and linear algebra to survive those, and still have interest in seeing what comes next. Right now I'd guess that most of your work is plugging numbers into formulas... physics isn't accounting with rocks, it's the process of figuring out why these things work.
EDIT: I should give a bit more detail than this. Basic, less-technical physics introductions have a place - starting out in a field, you'll need more motivation and guidance and some find that the technical things get in the way. The real turning point is when you're past that struggle... it's one thing to be told that a baseball flying through the air will be described roughly by a quadratic equation in height and a linear function in distance, and another entirely to start from scratch and see why that's the case. Physics can be incredibly difficult, but it's not impossible. If you are finding the mathematics-heavy stuff more palatable by thinking about it in physical terms, use that to your advantage (I first really learned calculus from the aforementioned Feynman texts) and get ready to stop accepting any answer without asking several layers of 'Why the hell does that work?' to see where the real work comes in.
EDIT 2: At every other opportunity I tend to offer whatever help I can give, so I might as well throw that in here, too... I have to know a good chunk of physics for various icky reasons (advanced mathematics studies in fields that interact frequently with theoretical physics, for example) and if you have *any* physics questions at all then feel free to ask in any way you find convenient - if I can't answer anything you throw at me, I can find someone who can in a very short period of time, and if you get bored I can load you down with more reading material than most people ever willingly endure in their entire lives. I don't mean to sound like I'm dismissing any possible special abilities that you may be finding, so if you're looking to get serious then send me a message and I'll do all I can to make your physics studies easier than mine were.
Jeff
