Physicist Need to memorize Hundreds of Equation?

I recall being a freshman at Columbia, and running into dozens of equations in my introductory mechanics course. (We were following a book by Sears and Zemansky.) I despaired at learning all those equations, and then realized that I didn’t have to. If I remembers F = ma, then I could derive all of the other equation whenever I needed them. There were some equations that were separate, such as the equations for friction, so I had to memorize a few more, but I recall that for each exam (until the final) it was two or less.

As a freshman, I also took a very advanced math class. Unlike the more elementary class, in which students memorized dozens of ways to do integral, our exams were all based on abstract reasoning, reaching difficult results or proving theorems based on deceptively elementary principles. For this class I don’t think I ever memorized an equation. But my friends, who were studying introductory integral calculus, did.

As a result, I have never become good at “doing integrals.” It never mattered in my career. If I needed to do an integral, I could always look it up in a table, or ask someone else. Just as few people need the capability to compute a square-root by hand, a physicist hardly ever has to evaluate an integral. Some people are different. One of my favorite professors at Cal was Evan Wichmann. When he was stressed out and wanted to relax, he told me, he would find some tricky integral to calculate. He never had to look it up to see if he got the right answer, because he was disciplined enough to always know if he was right.

I’ve often said that I never could be a biologist, chemist, historian, politician… because I don’t have a good memory. Then I read a wonderful book by Nigel Caulder called “The Mind of Man.” Among other topics, he discussed people who have “eidetic” memory, often called “photographic memory.” These extraordinary people, it turns out, tend to have (on average) extremely poor analytic ability. So maybe, I thought, my poor memory is related to my ability at math, physics, and abstract reasoning. If so, then I should not regret my poor memory.

So I’ve lived with this disability my entire life. I have poor memory for facts, foreign languages, people’s names, even faces. Fortunately, with a career in physics, this disability has not been disabling.  -Richard Muller