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Originally Posted by Vman455
Very much so. I've spent the last two years in calculus, physics, and engineering coursework, and it's the same sort of experience--especially physics labs pre-pandemic, where experiencing physical phenomena is worth 1000 times more than reading about them in books. One professor had us do a weekly write-up on important physicists of the past; one week I chose Emilie de Chatelet, a mistress of Voltaire who demonstrated (in the early 1700s, mind you) that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity by dropping balls into sand and measuring how far they penetrated. I imagine a lot of people today would poo-poo that sort of experiment as low-tech and uncontrolled, yet it was instrumental to our current understanding of physics.
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Good stuff. My father was a scientist and physicist and he instilled in me from a very young age that doing an experiment is often far preferable to reading theory. And in any area of car modification, that applies in spades.