Why do people think physics is so hard?

Schrodinger's Dog

Two words: Erwin Schrödinger. Brilliant mathemetician, brilliant physicist. In fact the brilliant phsysicists of our time would absolutely eat most pure mathemeticians for breakfast and leave their bones for the crows to pick over . Pure maths is worthless per se if it is never used. Only applied maths is valued in science, if you can do both your value is double.

Thrice

I find math to be incredibly easy compared to physics, probably because physics facts are much more disconnected. Physics gets easier for me once I can axiomatize it & that approach isn't usually taught in classes.

Schrodinger's Dog

I find both hard - if you find maths and physics easy I think the nobel prize awaits you - but together they make it much easier, if you can show one in visual form and get the math behind it it becomes more manageable, a good model is worth a thousand words.

For example I didn't get complex numbers untill I saw an example where a graph was used, then I said: I could call that 4D (x)(y)(z)(t), time and space, then time and space became much easier to comprehend mathematically. Minkowski diagrams and then light cones were the icing on the cake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_line.png

pivoxa15

I am not a US citizen, When you mention GPA, do you mean their University or high school grades? SAT is taken by final year high school students looking for a place in Uni isn't it?

Schrodinger's Dog

No neither am I, GPA at University, SAT scores to enter university, drop out rates, and a few other things.

joshtring

i think physics is the abstract or may be the funda of the rest of science! you feel physics easy then you find yourself able to solve anything that happens in this this world!

pivoxa15

So you are saying maths students tend to get better marks at maths than physics students at physics?

SAT consists of general testing including essays so one would tend to favour physics wanna-be scoring higher overall than pure maths wanna-be's.

For me though, I am not particularly bright or good at either physics or maths but I do have a large curiosity for nature and abstract entities. However, I feel that in general there isn't near as many 'impossible' type problems in physics than in maths. In other words I feel that given sufficient time, I am able to do any solved problem in physics but with maths, I can very quickly find a problem that I can't do and after a while get a feeling of 'never' be able to solve this problem. So you can say I am more confident at physics than at maths.

pivoxa15

I agree. If you succeed in physics than I think you would success in any other 'practical' endeavour. 'practical' being associated to the real world.

Schrodinger's Dog

GPAs alone would not be representative. Is the point.

chromosome24

the hard thing about physics is statistical mechanics! i have an assignment due tomorrow and im just about to gouge out my eyes.

doc.madani

some aspects of physics is hard and requires a lot of knowledge but physics is really fun and pretty simple stuff.

malawi_glenn

quite arrogant from a person asking questions about Newtons laws of motion..

_Mayday_

I haven't ventured that far into physics to be honest so I can't really comment on how difficult physics is after school. One of my teachers studied at a top university and said it was extremely difficult, but then another one of my old teachers said it was alright if you put the hours in. You can't really draw a conclusion from those two opinions really.

Personally I enjoy Physics, so I can live with it being difficult, some aspects I have covered are quite straight forward, like the Particle Physics we have covered, but that was in very straight forwards terms. The questions are alot harder when put in context with a real life scenario, and you have to figure out what a, b and c is, but the topics I have covered so far, when they are just numbers on a piece of paper, the formula are easily manipulated, and solved.

Overall I would say it is a difficult subject, in comparison with other subjects at the same level. If you say physics is very easy then surely you should have some grades or qualifications to back it up? As much as I would like to say it is straight forward, I will only know straight forward I find it in the summer when I get my results, or when I start university.

_Mayday_

Nano

I see a lot of people are saying that if you're bad at math, you'll be bad at physics. However, I'm quite advanced for my grade level at math, and I also happen to enjoy it, so I assumed I would be good at physics as well. But that's not the case, I'm actually terrible at physics for reasons I don't understand.
So is there some inherent difference between math and physics that i'm overlooking. They both seem to rely heavily on problem solving.

humanino

I too was much better at math at a young age. The thing with math is that you always know what you're talking about. Physics is actually more abstract ! In math, you cannot let the slightest detail ruin your work, you must pay attention to every little thing. In physics, the problem is not to focus on irrelevant features, you must know how to approximate reliably.

Nano

I'm not quite sure what you mean, could you give an example?

I find that I'm as bad at solving physics problems than I am at understanding conceptual questions. A lot of people say that physics is hard because it messes with your intuition. But don't all subjects do that on some level or the other? Eventually you learn the misconceptions you held were wrong, and you learn the new way. But I don't seem to be able to "absorb" the new intuition that physics presents. Manipulating equations is fine, but thinking through a foreign concept with a new set of rules they give you is challenging.

D H

This thread has been raised from the dead four times now.

Whereas physicists don't have to know what they're talking about?

One difference between mathematics and physics is that physics is bound to reality (go ahead, humanino, give me the grumpy face back for making an enthymematically disparaging remark regarding mathematics; I deserve it). In physics one has to know what's important and what's important to ignore. Example: I'm working with some people new to a regime that I know very well. They kept adding a requirement to model an effect important in the regime in which they normally work. I kept striking this requirement because I know both regimes and I know the effect of interest is irrelevant. They finally got it when I made them realize that this capability is more than an order magnitude smaller than uncertainties in the dominant effects in this new regime. (Sorry to be so obtuse. I can't give out the details.) Knowing what throw away and what not to throw away is very important in physics.