Learning physics with AI

It is late and you are stuck on the third numerical in the chapter. Your answer does not match the one printed at the back of the book. Nobody in the house can tell you which line went wrong.

An AI app will work through that numerical with you at any hour. It is genuinely good at some physics and quietly bad at other parts. This lesson is mostly about knowing which is which.

Where it is safe, and where it is not

Start with a map. Get this map wrong and nothing else in the lesson will save you.

The safe zone is a question you type out in words. Concept questions, definitions and standard numericals usually come back correct. School physics in plain text is something these tools now handle well.

The unsafe zone has two parts. The first is any question that depends on a picture. That covers circuits, ray diagrams, free body diagrams, graphs and apparatus. The second is anything about your current syllabus or your exam pattern.

One test of a leading model, published in 2025, showed the picture gap clearly. On text-only physics questions it got about 81 out of 100 right. On questions where it had to read the picture, only about 49. Questions about laboratory work were the worst of all, near 35.

So the rule is short. If the question needs the picture, do not trust the answer.

You will also see news that an AI scored full marks in a physics olympiad. That was a research setup with special tools, many tries and expert markers. It is not the free app in your hand, answering on the first go.

One more thing the map cannot tell you. Testing the app on a question from your own textbook proves very little. Those questions and their answers are already inside what it learned from. Change the numbers yourself, or turn the question around, and then see how it does. That is a fair test of a topic.

Your syllabus is a separate trap. NCERT content has been trimmed and changed in recent years. A model trained on older books will teach you a chapter that is no longer in your course. Open the chapter PDF yourself at ncert.nic.in/textbook.php. For an exam pattern, read the official information bulletin on the exam body’s own website, not an AI summary of it.

Get the concept in words you already use

Most physics explanations fail for one of two reasons. They run too long, or they use words you have to look up. So give rules you can check by counting.

Explain friction to a class 10 student in India.
Rules for your answer:
1. Every sentence under fifteen words.
2. Use one everyday example: a bullock cart, a hand pump,
   a ceiling fan or a tubewell.
3. Do not use a word I would have to look up.
4. Maximum eight sentences.
Then ask me one question to check I understood.

A good answer is short and points at something you can see. It looks roughly like this.

“Friction is the force that fights against sliding. Push a loaded bullock cart on dry ground and it resists you. Put oil on the axle and the cart rolls more easily. The oil has reduced the friction at that joint.”

Then open your book and see whether the chapter says the same thing. That habit is the whole point of the answer machine trap, and it costs you about a minute.

One more habit costs nothing at all. Ask in English first, even broken English. Then ask for the same answer again in Hindi.

Ab yahi baat aasan Hindi mein samjhao.

In one 2025 test, the same model sat a physics concept test twice. It scored about 69 out of 100 in English and about 49 in Hindi. The gap is closing as models improve. The two-step is still free insurance, and using AI in Hindi covers the rest of it.

Make it show the units at every step

This is the single most useful prompt in the lesson. Paste it above any numerical.

Solve this problem for a class 10 student in India.
Follow these rules in order.
1. List every given value with its unit.
2. Change everything to SI units and show the change.
3. Write the formula and its name BEFORE you use it.
4. Put the numbers in. Show every step, with the unit on every step.
5. Give the final answer with its unit.
6. LAST, do a separate UNIT CHECK. Write the unit of each side of
   the formula and show that they are the same. If they are not the
   same, write STOP, I made a mistake.
Problem: [type your problem here]

Change class 10 to class 12 if that is where you are. Rule 6 is the part that matters most. You can check a unit without knowing the physics behind it. A speed cannot come out in kilograms. An area cannot come out in centimetres.

Now add a second habit, before you read the answer at all.

Before you solve, tell me roughly how big the answer should be,
and why. Say whether it is bigger or smaller than one, and what
the unit should be. Then solve.

Read that rough size first. Then read the final number and see whether the two agree. This catches a decimal point in the wrong place, which is the error most likely to survive a neat-looking solution.

Keep the chat short while you do this. One doubt, one chat, then close it. Long back and forth chats get worse, not better. The app slowly stops teaching and starts handing over solutions, and one chat, one job explains why.

Make it state the formula, and say when it works

Four kinds of physics mistake turn up again and again.

• It drops a unit, or mixes two different units in one line.
• It gets a direction or a sign wrong.
• It uses a formula outside the conditions where that formula is valid.
• It uses a constant that is not the one your book uses.

Mixed units are easy to miss when the working looks neat. A speed given in kilometres per hour will not sit with a distance in metres. Rule 2 of the prompt above exists for exactly this. Read the conversion lines before you read anything else.

Direction is a known weak area. Anything with a direction in three dimensions is risky. That includes the right hand rule, Fleming’s rules and the direction of an induced current. Check every direction against your book, every time.

The most dangerous answer opens with a perfectly correct statement of a law. Then it applies that law to your particular problem in the wrong way. A 2023 study of an early model found exactly this shape. The wording was convincing and the physics underneath it was wrong. Newer models get many of those questions right. The shape of a wrong answer has not changed.

So make it commit to the rules before it touches the numbers.

Before you solve, write the formula you will use and its full name.
Then write the conditions under which that formula is valid.
Say clearly whether this problem breaks any of those conditions.
Also write the value of every constant you use.
Only after that, solve.

Now you have something to check against the book. A formula used outside its conditions is easy to spot once it is written down in the open.

One pump, two answers

Here is the heart of the lesson. Work the problem on paper first, then ask. Students who paste the question straight in often cannot tell a wrong answer from a right one. In one study of physics students, nearly half of the AI-helped solutions were believed correct when they were not.

The problem below is class 10 level.

A pump lifts 600 kg of water to a height of 10 m in 5 minutes. Find the power of the pump.

This is the kind of answer that comes back, and it is wrong.

Given: mass = 600 kg, height = 10 m, time = 5 minutes
g = 10 metre per second squared
Work done = m x g x h
Work = 600 x 10 x 10 = 60000 J
Power = Work / time
Power = 60000 / 5 = 12000 W

Read it again. Every line follows from the line above it. The formulas are the right formulas. The arithmetic is right. It still gives an answer that is sixty times too big.

Now run the unit check. The watt is one joule per second. But 60000 joules was divided by 5 minutes, not by 5 seconds. So that line produces joules per minute. The unit written on the answer does not match the unit the working produced. That is your signal.

Fix that one line and the answer comes out right. Five minutes is 300 seconds. 60000 divided by 300 gives 200 W.

The rough size check catches the same error on its own. Five minutes is a few hundred seconds. So the answer must be 60000 divided by a few hundred, which lands in the hundreds. A number in the thousands was never possible.

One more thing in that working is worth a second look. It used a value of 10 for g. Your chapter may use a different value. Check the constant in your own book before you copy the line.

You did not need to understand power to catch any of this. You needed the unit line and a rough guess. There are more checks of this kind in seven ways to check a maths answer, and they work on physics too.

Do not ask the app “are you sure”. It fixes very few of its own mistakes, and it tends to repeat the same wrong answer with the same confidence. Open a fresh chat and ask again in your own words instead, as the two-chat test explains.

Derivations and five-mark answers

A derivation goes wrong in a special way. The model assumes a condition quietly, never says so, and the steps after it look perfect. Marks are lost exactly there. So force the assumptions into the open first.

Derive [name the result] step by step for a class 12 student.
Before you begin, list every assumption you are making,
as a numbered list.
After each step, name the law or definition you used.
Mark clearly any step where you are assuming something.

Then hold that numbered list against the derivation in your textbook. If the book assumes four things and the app assumed two, you have found the gap.

Indian board marking rewards structure. An examiner is looking for parts, in order, each worth marks. You can ask for that shape directly.

This is a 5-mark physics question in an Indian board exam: [paste it].
Break the full answer into the parts an examiner looks for.
Give the likely marks for each part.
Tell me what diagram I must draw and exactly what to label.
Describe the diagram in words. Do not draw it.
Keep the whole answer under 180 words, in simple English.

Treat that structure as a suggestion, not as the marking scheme. The app does not know your board’s current paper. Add one more line to any physics prompt to reduce the damage.

Also tell me: is this topic in the CURRENT NCERT class 12 physics
syllabus? If it is not, write NOT IN NCERT.

Then verify it. Open the actual chapter PDF from ncert.nic.in/textbook.php and look. Download the chapters you need once on a shared wifi connection and keep them on your phone. After that, checking costs you no data at all.

When you want to see a thing happen instead of reading about it, use a free simulation. PhET, at phet.colorado.edu, has free physics simulations that run inside a phone browser. A simulation is not a language model, so it cannot make something up. Open those on wifi, because they use much more data than plain chat.

You do not need a paid plan for any of this. On picture-based physics tasks, cheaper models have sometimes scored better than expensive ones in testing. Your marks come from the checking habit, not from the plan you are on.

It describes the diagram, you draw it

Never copy a picture made by an AI into your notebook or your answer sheet. This is not a small rule.

Ask for the diagram in words instead, then draw it by hand from your book. Board exams give marks for a neat hand-drawn labelled figure anyway.

Do NOT make a picture. Describe the ray diagram for a concave mirror
with the object beyond the centre of curvature.
List every part I must draw.
Say where each part goes: left, right, above, below.
Give the exact spelling of every label.
Then tell me the NCERT chapter and figure number so I can copy it.

The same idea works in reverse. When a question comes with a diagram, type the diagram out in words rather than sending a photo. Say what is joined to what and which way each arrow points. This removes the app’s worst skill from the job. It is also a real test of whether you understood the circuit yourself. There is a full lesson on this in diagrams: it describes, you draw.

The same rule covers your practical file. Ask for the aim, the apparatus, the steps and viva questions. Never let it fill in readings you did not take.

Chemistry breaks in a different place, and you need a different set of checks for it. That is the next lesson, learning chemistry with AI.