Spoiler warning: This short post contains spoilers for Project Hail Mary. If you haven’t watched it yet, go watch it!
Watching a Ryan Gosling movie and ending up with the sudden urge to revise central forces and orbital mechanics wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. And yet, here we are. Exam season is creeping closer every passing day, so I guess I can’t complain too much, but I will anyway, because that’s what this blog is for.
The whole thing that breaks me about revision, something I keep ranting about, is that your brain simply does not care about things without a reason. Not a ‘this will be on the exam’ reason. A real reason, the kind where something is at stake. I’ve spent ages trying to manufacture that feeling artificially, which doesn’t work because brains are not that stupid and they know when you’re bluffing. Mine in particular has apparently decided it will only cooperate under very specific conditions, none of which involve a past paper.
And then Ryland Grace wakes up in the Hail Mary spaceship with no memory of who he is, the sun is dying, he’s completely alone, and he just… starts doing physics. Nobody had really told him to, but the alternative is that every living thing on Earth dies. That’s your motivation sorted right there. He doesn’t revise orbital mechanics. He needs orbital mechanics. And look, I’m not saying1 we should all have our memories wiped and be drugged and launched into space to make revision feel urgent.
The scenes where he’s piecing things together like figuring out where he is, what the Astrophage is doing, how to communicate with Rocky, that’s just a guy desperately trying to understand things because understanding is the only tool he has. And he learns an alien language from scratch faster than most of us learn to care about a module we’ve been doing for months, which says something, I’m just not sure what. Watching all of that made me feel something I haven’t felt in a while about maths, which is: oh right, this stuff is actually for figuring things out. Revolutionary concept as it turns out.
The point is, if you’re someone who finds it hard to care about physics or maths in the abstract like me, maybe let Grace care about it first and see if any of that rubs off. It worked on me, somehow, against my will, during exam season. And if and when you get stuck, just remember that you’re smart, you’ll figure it out.
And with that, I’m going to go do some dynamics questions now. Statement 👎.
- But I’m not not saying that either. Though to be fair, Grace didn’t exactly volunteer either, so maybe we have more in common than I’d like to admit ↩︎
Maths Rant 