Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Findaer asks, Since you’ve done a number of episodes on fairly complex topics, did you hit an “Ah ha!” moment for some of the bigger ones like nuclear physics or chemistry, or was it more of a gradual understanding? Do you have any favorite “Ah ha!” moments?

There are several examples, but one of the best is probably trigonometry.I took a trigonometry class in high school, and all of the trigonometric functions were just given to us as the ratios of triangle sides. We had to learn it through rote memorization, and it was never explained exactly why they were important or what the relevance of any of it was. None of it ever stuck with me.

Later in college, I had a professor explain the same thing, but this time they did it using a unit circle. Everything instantly clicked.

From that point, I didn’t need to memorize anything, because I could figure it out by knowing the unit circle…and the end points on the sine and cosine graph. From that, it was easy to know what trig function to use where, and most importantly, why.

I had a similar moment with ternary diagrams in geology.

For most things, you might have to hear it several times, and in several different ways, before something sinks in. For kids in school today, YouTube is an amazing resource precisely because if they don’t understand something, they can probably find a dozen people who all might explain it a bit differently.

It is also why I don’t feel bad about encore episodes. Even if you did listen to the original episode, hearing it again after a year is probably going to make something sink in that didn’t at first.