Why Is Econ 101 So Bad?

When I was 15, I was probably a little too obsessed with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople. In my teenage mind, that was the moment when the world became modern -- when cannons knocked down the great curtain walls that had kept the world's greatest fortress impregnable for a thousand years. It was the triumph of science and engineering over medieval brute force.

So Constantinople was on my mind when our intro physics teacher took us to the lab to test the theory of projectile motion. It involved lobbing metal balls at a piece of tape and recording where the balls hit. When we looked at the tape, it was like magic -- the math had predicted just where the ball would hit. Physics theory really worked. "So that's how they did it!," I exclaimed to myself, thinking of the Turkish cannon pounding away at the Byzantine walls. (Little did I know that 15th century gunners found their range by trial and error; mathematical firing solutions would come centuries later.)