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It is, however, artificial and unrealistic as a physics
problem. It is a nice mathematics problem.
What I was really complaining about in my post was the kind of problem one
often sees in physics books in which an artificial situation is presented
using words and images which imply a real-world setting. These often throw
students off the scent, forcing them to strip away these embelishments to
get at the heart of the matter. The best students will do this, and thrive
on it. The rest will be confused and frustrated, and complain that
physicists must live in some wonderful ivory tower where worms crawl in
straight lines, pulleys are frictionless and massless, projectiles travel
in parabolic paths, and V = IR where R is constant.