07/17/2023

In a famous study, advanced PhDs and undergraduate physics students were given sets of physics problems and asked to sort them into categories. Immediately, a stark difference became apparent. Whereas beginners tended to look at superficial features of the problem—such as whether the problem was about pulleys or inclined planes—experts focused on the deeper principles at work. “Ah, so it’s a conservation of energy problem,” you can almost hear them saying as they categorized the problem by what principles of physics they represented. This approach is more successful in solving problems because it gets to the core of how the problems work.

— Scott Young, Ultralearning