Mechanics for liberal arts students

摘要

From my quarter-century experience of educating liberal arts students of Keio University in Japan, who are generally not good at mathematics, I believe that mechanics is a very effective subject for them to learn scientific approaches through observations and experiments on mechanical phenomena: they develop a study skill of how to find a problem, form a hypothesis for the solution, validate it, and finally solve the problem. This is because many phenomena in mechanics are comparatively simple but attractive, ubiquitous, easily observable, sometimes intuitively understandable and sometimes mysterious.