This article is about how I started learning physics as a hobby from Primary 3 when I was 10 years old, and finished learning a few topics in university year 1 physics and maths around Secondary 4 when I was 16 years old.
My interest in physics started in Primary 3 in 1975, when I found a comic book in my school library. This comic book was a biography of Issac Newton, who lived about 400 years ago.
Funnily enough, I cannot remember what exactly was in the book. What I do remember was the reason why physics fascinated me : with a few simple ideas we call “laws”, it can explain many things and calculate them very accurately.
This seemed like magic to me – magic in the real world. It was this fascination that made me spend much of my free time – after I finished my school work – trying to learn physics.
Trying to learn physics was a hobby to me. Much like how people spend their free time playing smart phone today, I spent my free time trying to learn physics.
And for much of primary 3 to primary 6, trying was what I did, rather than learning. There was no internet then. I started with what was then the most obvious place to me – the National Library, and old book stores.
At that time, the main library was at Stamford Road. The old books stores included those at Bras Basah Road, and the flea market in Chinatown. I still remember buying my very first physics textbook from a store at Pagoda Street in Chinatown.
I was probably familiar with Chinatown because it was a short walk from my primary school. The flea market did not look too different from the Sungei Road one. Both are gone now, the good old days.
The “store” was really just a small mountain of books thrown randomly on a floor mat right next to the side wall of Mariamman Temple. I ploughed through the books and found a really thick one that looked like this.
It was a really thick book, around 5 cm thick. I flipped through the pages of text with some figures and equations here and there. I did not understand a thing in the book. I did not even know "Advanced Level" was an exam until I was in secondary school.
But I must have thought it looked like the physics I wanted to learn. So I bought it – for 50 cents. I was probably Primary 4 or 5 then. I took the book home and tried reading it.
Of course, I did not understand a thing. I was a primary school kid trying to read an A level physics textbook. For some reason, I found it really fun and exciting. I just kept reading line after line of words without understand much, day after day.
In case you wonder, I did play with other kids, both school mates and neighbours. But when I was home, after finishing schoolwork and helping my mother with some cleaning, I would "read" the book.
I did not understand what it was talking about, but it is also not true that I understood nothing at all. This was a typical page.
After staring for many days, I started wondering what those equal signs with letters were about. For example, s = ut + ½ at2 and a = dv/dt.
In those days, algebra was not taught in primary school. So I did not know that those were something called algebra. And in those days, A level physics apparently had calculus.
I had no idea what these letters and signs meant, but I wanted to find out. I was on my own with no one to talk to. My parents did not know English. And as this was my hobby, I did not think of asking my maths teacher.
It was a mystery! So I started looking for clues in books – books in the National Library at Stamford Road, books in the MPH bookshop just a short walk from the library. MPH bookshops used to be everywhere. There is only one in Singapore now, at SingPost Centre.
It was in the MPH bookshop at Samford Road that I found a book with maths calculations that had letters everywhere. The title was Teach Yourself Algebra. The English sentences looked simple enough to understand.
I bought the book. That was the turning point. This is an example from one of the pages in the book. It explained everything from the very basics, and in a simple way.
This was a big help. With a book like this, whether for a child or adult, then or now, all it takes is time and willingness to learn.
And willing I was. I spent nearly all my time after school and homework on this book. I was around Primary 5 then. I did not have any school teacher or tuition teacher to ask. Anyway, that would be like telling me the answer to a mystery and taking all the fun away.
I had great fun “deciphering” the text, learning and doing the problems, something that would probably be quite boring for most children. It normally took me a long time, but whenever I solved a problem, I would be very happy.
I never thought I was particularly clever. It was not as if I read each page and understood it in a minute. I just happened to like this stuff enough to spend a lot of time on it.
For me, this was never about studying. It was a game for me – a mind game. Today, “mind game” is popular if you search on google, but probably not about school maths.
It must have taken me many months but I worked through the whole Teach Yourself Algebra book. When I went back to read the physics book, I found yet another symbol I could not understand : a = dv/dt.
This looks just like algebra, where for example dv would mean the number d multiplied by the number v. The physics book said that v was velocity, but did not say what ‘d’ was.
I must have spent weeks or months browsing through maths books in National Library and bookshops when I finally found the answer in a book by the same author: ‘d’ was a symbol, not a number. It was used in another type of maths - called calculus.
Happily, I bought the book. But I did not read more than a few pages before I was stuck. The book seemed to say that the d symbol is used to represent the gradient of a graph.
What is gradient ? And what is graph ??
It is funny looking back at this experience after 40 years. Instead of giving up, this became a new piece of my puzzle. So it was back to the library, back to bookshops.
With the experience so far, I quickly found that gradient and graph belonged to yet another topic of maths – called coordinate geometry. Before long, I found that I needed trigonometry also.
Guess what? Each of those maths topics has a Teach Yourself book dedicated to it !
This time, I quickly found all the Teach Yourself books I needed. So it was that most of my play time in Primary 4, 5 and 6 were spent learning all the maths I needed – in order to understand the Advanced Level Physics book.
I did not find them easy at all. In fact, I remember that trigonometry was the most tiring, with many equations I had to understand. Tiring, but fun. I did all the exercises. Proved all the equations.
I must have been Primary 5 or 6 then. At that time, I lived in what was commonly called a one-and-a-half room flat.
The balcony was where I sat, while my parents were at work. When I was not in school and when I finished playing with the neighbours kids, I sat on the floor at the balcony. In the sun. With a chilli plant beside me. Hour after hour. Day after day.
Where children today play games on their smart phones, I played games with the maths symbols and equations in my head. I would try and understand it by rearranging the symbols and ideas in my head until they were related in very simple ways.
Whenever everything fit and I proved an equation, I would be very happy. Perhaps like a child winning a game on smart phone today.
So it was school, home, play with neighbours’ kids, teach yourself maths books. By the time I started Sec 1 in Raffles Institution (RI), I had worked through all the maths and was finally ready to start on that long awaited book – Advanced Level Physics.
RI was at Grange Road then. I looked through all the maths books in the RI library. One day, while flipping through an algebra textbook to see what else I needed to learn, the librarian walked past and told me that the book was too difficult for me. I did not tell her that I already knew the materials in the book.
While my classmates chased after a ball on the field during recess time everyday, I stared at the words and symbols in the physics book, trying to think of all sorts of ways to make sense of the words.
It was like a mental jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are the different bits of information in each definition, law, equation, explanation or question. I would read a section over and over, rearrange each bit of information in different ways in my head.
I would keep going until all the details could be related in a simple way. For some reason, “simple” became my requirement to decide whether I have understood something in physics and maths.
I do not know why I made up this requirement. Maybe because if it did not become simple, then I would not understand it anyway. Looking back, I now understand that the “simple” requirement meant that it was easier to tell whether each step is logical.
This “all the details can all be related in a simple way” requirement worked very well for me. Not that I could learn faster. But it ensured that I understood the physics correctly.
As always, the ultimate test was whether I could do the questions in each chapter correctly. It would take many months. Eventually, I did – all the questions in that thick Advanced Level Physics book. That was around Sec 2.
This was all done during play time. I did have homework in English, Chinese, geography, history, science, maths, …
I did play, of course. I did not like football. But I liked judo, and joined the judo club. I also joined NPCC, which stands for National Police Cadet Corps - though I would not call that "play". We spent hours spent doing marching drills and polishing boots until we could “see our teeth” in the reflection …
By Sec 2, my parents had upgraded to a 3-room flat in Bukit Ho Swee. That was twice the number of rooms of our previous flat ! And almost walking distance from RI at Grange Road. I took turns walking and taking bus to school.
Soon after that, I started Sec 3. I chose what was called the “three sciences” - physics, chemistry, biology. And two maths – elementary maths and additional maths.
So of all the 7 subjects, I really only had to study 3 – English, biology, chemistry. Oh, I did not have to study Chinese much either. I spent my childhood reading Chinese novels. I actually read Sherlocks Holmes translation in Chinese first - the complete set - before I read the English version a few years later.
That left me time to continue learning more physics and maths. And then I found this book in the national library.
I did not know it then, but this was at the level of university year 1 physics. On flipping through the book, I realized that this booked explained in detail how the elliptical (oval) shape of a planet’s orbit can be calculated from Newton’s laws.
That was one of the most famous achievement of Newton in history. I thought I had to find out how he did it. Again, I needed to learn new maths, this time – something called vector calculus.
By then, I was kind of experienced in hunting down the books I needed – books that were relevant and at the right level.
I spent my free time in Sec 3 on vector calculus and planetary orbits. I was finally able to derive the equations that can allow us to calculate the motion - the position and speed as time passes - of a planet.
With vector calculus, I realized that this same mathematics was also used in the physics of electromagnetic waves – the general name for radio wave, light wave and X ray. I spent much of my free time in Sec 4 on that.
It was only when I started university that I realised had already learnt 2 of the topics in university year 1 physics.
When I started Raffles Junior College, I took physics, chemistry, maths and further maths. Chemistry and General Paper were the main topics I had to study. There was Chinese also, but that was ok as I spent a lot of time reading Chinese novels since primary school.
So it was that I spent much of my time helping classmates with physics and maths. Partly because of this, partly because of my interest in physics and maths, I decided that I wanted to be a teacher.
But as described in my other article on “My formal education”, a series of events led me away from teaching as a career. But in my spare time, I still enjoy teaching and helping students with physics and maths.
If you read this and are interested to try and learn maths and physics yourself, there are endless options today, many of them free and good. Just go to google or YouTube, type in what you want to learn. Of course, you do have to spend time and have patience to browse through them to find something at the right level suitable for you.
You can still find teach yourself books. Today there are also many versions, like the Dummies and Demystified series.
But google or books, it does take time and patience to find materials that match a student's need – whether it is for school work, or for interest.
For students who do not have the kind of interest in physics and maths that I do, studying these two topics can be hard. But in my experience, the willingness to put in time and concentration can make a big difference to learning.