Before I talk about strategies for approaching problems, let me just briefly address the reason why problem solving is so important in physics. Contrary to how it may seem, this is not a form of torture, nor is it meant to be somehow painful or unpleasant. Physicists derive no particular pleasure in requiring students to solve problems. Instead, you might think just how awesome it is that we can ask questions that have numerical answers! We can say, for example, that a ball dropped from a tall building will not only fall, but we can calculate how fast it will be going when it hits the ground! (given the height of the building). Thus physics provides a quantitative description of Nature. Further, this quantitative aspect gives a richer and deeper understanding of physical phenomena. But on a more practical level, physicists often find employment based on their problem solving abilities. The same skills that helpful in solving physics problems are transferable to other disciplines, such as finance, economics, biology, and even the liberal arts.
Fortunately, problem solving in physics is a skill that can be learned and improved with practice. While many of the worked examples in most texts are great to study, they represent the end product of a successfully solved problem, and don't explicitly show the steps that one goes through in figuring out how to solve problems. It is the aim of this web page to detail a procedure that enables one to systematically approach physics problems.
To be finished soon ...