Unit III – Space and Time

Our study of energy allowed us to connect the initial and final configurations of a system. By using the fact that energy is conserved, we were able to predict how a system would behave in the future. But, how does the system get from the inital to the final configurations? In biological language, what is the mechanism?

In order to answer that question, we first must make sure that we know how describe the fundamental quantities of our world, space and time, in our mathematical language. This deep dive into the description of space and time mathematically will be the focus of this unit. Along the way, we will learn some fun new ways to better use spreadsheets.

Before you begin this unit, you might want to brush up on your, properties of triangles (Appendix L), trigonometry (Appendix N and Appendix O), as well as all the different things you can learn from a graph (Appendix S).