Is my view of Theoretical physics romanticized?

[Rika]

The thing is i do not find mathematics truly beautiful unless i can imagine it in a platonic sense. Not to say any mathematics is non platonic, but what i mean by this is, i would prefer to imagine a hilbert space rather than think of it as a real or complex inner product space that is also a complete metric space with respect to the distance function induced by the inner product. I am more of a geometer than algebraist/number theorist (not that i don't find them interesting). I LOVE TO VISUALISE.
So the question is which field should i go into? Physics because you have to visualise everything in physics or pure geometry? Maybe a mixture?

If you like to visualise, think and use your imagination then why don't you try visual arts?

 

[discrete*]

It seems to me that you're young, brash and immature, philosopher_K. I'm not trying to insult you, but you seem to have a very misconstrued notion of what life at university is like and furthermore, what math and physics are like.

Maybe you should put the question of your career on the back burner for a while and get a couple of years of university education under you belt before you go around trumpeting these rather radical ideas.

And it wouldn't hurt you to become just a tad more humble in your ways. Relegating construction workers to "dumb apes" is an incredibly stupid thing to do. Quite honestly, because of these types of statements that you made, people are not taking you seriously. It's very hard to have a young person come out with "I'm just as smart as Witten and Tao" and than two posts later say something so ignorant.

And in regards to crushing your dream: well, kid -- it happens. Multiple times throughout life. Trust me. If you love physics or math or whatever it is you're proclaiming, than just do what you have to do to make yourself happy and don't whine about it the entire way there.

 

[feathermoon]

I just realized I'm this kid, except five years later. I continued to become increasingly disaffected by my physics course work, but not being a quitter I stuck with it. Now I have a bachelors degree in physics with a B- GPA. My prospects of getting into graduate school are slim and I wonder about how to proceed.

Yep, just major in mathematics, biology or something Philosopher K, you might thank yourself later. If you're not sure you're interested at this point, you might not decide you're not until its too late.

 

[Kevin_Axion]

I initially came in this thread interested in what the OP had to say since I changed my major from physics after finding out it really wasn't what I thought I expected it to be, so I switched to engineering. However, now all I rather say is that with that kind of attitude, it will be hard for him or her to be successful, regardless of where that person goes on to do in life.
The posters you are referring to said they did their high school studies in Toronto and Calgary. Coincidentally, I actually started high school in Toronto and finished in Calgary, and unless things have drastically changed in the last few years, there is no way that calculus or linear algebra are requirements to graduate. If that was the case, then dropout rates would shoot up at least 20% in one year. Here in Calgary you can graduate from high school without taking any sort of grade 12 math. The reason why students take these courses is because those are typically required by Canadian universities to be admitted as an undergrad in engineering/math/physics.

I never said it was necessary, I said we take linear algebra and calculus. You only need 3 math credits. But it is necessary to take Calculus, advanced functions and vectors in grade 12 to get into a Math/Science program.

 

[twofish-quant]

And as twofish said, the last 3 things on your list are pretty much common, boring, everyday concepts to physicists (I know, how can those things be boring?).

Because the math is trivial. To do special relativity, you just need high school math. Once you realize that all time dilation is just a "strange sort of rotation" it gets boring pretty quickly. Also, Einstein was a totally freaking genius because he came up with something so simple.

Physicists simply live in a different world than most people because we've become use to ideas that are beyond the comprehension of some people.

But it works the other way. Some "simple things" are physically quite complicated. Trying to figure out how a log burns in a fireplace is incredibly complex and more interesting to me that time dilation. Personally, I'm fascinated by trying to mathematically model complex systems, which is why there is an easy jump from theoretical astrophysics to finance.

 

[GoldPheonix]

Hey guys. I am a final year high school student and have lately been researching a career in Mathematics/Theoretical physics. Most recently i have come to the conclusion that:
1. I am not as gifted in mathematics as i thought
2. I do not enjoy PURE mathematics as much as i once believed i did.

I had this view that mathematicians sat around and had massive eureka moments (like Archimedes), solving problems such as fermats last theorem, or Poincare’s conjecture with flashes of genius. Yet when i look at the actual proofs just noted, i am struck by just how different my perceptions are. For example Wiles' proof is something like 150 pages long and filled with long definition/lemma/proof style formatting. It isn't that the ideas are not clever of right, its just that in the end i don't really care that much about ricci flow or modular forms as much as i thought i would. A modular form is not some abstract idea that exists wether we care or not, it is a definition which we have formed so as to define more objects. Disagree all you want, i have come to disagree with even plato.

With my love of mathematics corrupted i quickly turned to theoretical physics. After all what could be cooler than discovering a theory about dimensions, tiny strings, other universes or time itself. So once again i began to research the field of mathematical/theoretical physics, only to find that once again i was misled. The field was all about Gauges, Metric spaces and Eigenvectors, whatsmore the questions were not as philosophical as i enjoyed, no answers to the mystery’s of time or how the universe came into being, more about how abstract mathematics was perceived to fit in with reality.

For years i have read popsci books by hawking, Kaku and greene, speaking about the exact things i love. Yet why is the practice of theoretical physics so different to these ideals? What is wrong with me? did i miss some gene which stops me loving mathematics as much as Edward Witten or Stephen Hawking? Does it just not click in my head? Or do i just need more training in mathematics and physics before i see the true beauty beneath the surface?
I have tried to find this beauty but so far, no matter which college book i read, there is nothing like the excitement i felt when reading a brief history of time.

Are the days of Einstein gone? Did the ever exist in the first place? I am so damn confused!
If i am right, then what the hell do i do with my life?

There are a few of issues here:

1.) Honestly, in sum total I've probably read about 5 popular science articles in my life; however, a NOVA episode was something that helped me make my decision to become a physicist (I should note that I'm a 4th year physics and mathematics BS student, so I'm not actually a physicist yet although I've done professional research). I was not attracted to physics because it sounded cool, but because I enjoy mathematics and the application of mathematics. In my third year of high school, I took a physics course and hated it, although I thought the ideas were interesting. I decided to take another physics course, and ended up enjoying the difficulty of physics and the beauty of using equations to describe reality. My enjoyment of the two has only increased since then. So, I'm in a unique situation where reading pop-sci never interested me, and so my views of physics were never really tainted by them.

2.) Along the lines of 1, in my first university course on physics, my professor explained to the class: "If the thought of spending hours trying to figure out how a fix a piece of equipment to get an experiment working sounds interesting, you should think about experimental physics. If the thought of spending hours trying to solve mathematical problems in order to get closer to understanding the predictions made by a model sounds interesting, you should consider theoretical physics." My advice is to both think and not think in the long term. At the moment, you should ask yourself the following question: "Do you enjoy the mathematics you're doing now? Do see and appreciate the logical elegance behind them? Do you find mathematics to be interesting at the level that your current level?" The thing is, statements about metric tensors, eigenvectors, and gauge fields sounds very intimidating. But that's only fair; when you were a seven year old, the concept of trigonometry sounded hard. You weren't ready for the idea, so of course they sounded difficult and overly technical; but this is precisely why we send students through undergrad --to get them ready to learn advanced concepts. So don't worry about what you're learning in the long term --if you enjoy the technical mathematics that you're currently engaged in, this will tell you more about what math you will think is interesting in the future and will be more informative than the advanced math you think is interesting now. With that said, think in the long term. If you don't like the math you're doing now and don't feel like it's interesting, you may very well want to consider. However, I do have to inquire: mathematics is the language of physics and mathematics is very technical, so why did you expect that physicists and mathematicians wouldn't be engaged in very technical language? Metric tensors, gauge groups and fields, eigensystems, etc, are mathematics; these make up parts of the language of physics. Did you really expect that physics wasn't going to be technical?

Also, I can tell you the following with utmost certainty --if you don't like theoretical physics because it's too technical, you will absolutely abhor modern mathematics. While some modern physicists have ignored the advances in abstract mathematics, absolutely every modern pure mathematician almost exclusively engages in abstract mathematics.


3.) Being a physicist is not easy. If you don't like things because they get too technical and are not romantic enough, I can say that physics is definitely not for you. Again, you really don't know how you're going to feel about advanced math and physics yet because you're not at a level where you can understand them and either appreciate or be indifferent to them --only time will really tell that (should you choose to go this route). But make no mistake, mathematics and physics are incredibly difficult and technical subjects. You will struggle, you will fail to understand concepts initially, and you will challenged in every course. None of this means, ultimately, that you'll be a bad physicist or mathematician, but you should be aware that the sciences are not easy. Like Nietzsche said, and this particularly true in math and physics, "whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger."


My advice is, although perhaps I'm biased, to continue on with a double major in mathematics and physics at a university level. If after a few semesters you find you still enjoy neither, to switch majors or find a different career. There's no wrong or right answer to this, you simply should find what you like doing.

 

[fasterthanjoao]

I am more of a geometer than algebraist/number theorist (not that i don't find them interesting).

I would be surprised if you actually knew anything about these fields. One thing you should also realize is that just because you want to do physics doesn't mean you have to pretend to understand and enjoy everything about physics/maths. It's OK to be honest with yourself. Even then, the time when you can consider things like this is years off for you - start your undergraduate first and take it from there.

If I could give you one point of advice to consider when contemplating your future career it is this: before you start any proper training, forget what you think you know.

Being snobby and making judgements about things you've barely even heard of never mind begin to understand is silly and will ultimately likely cause you great disadvantage.

So the question is which field should i go into? Physics because you have to visualise everything in physics or pure geometry? Maybe a mixture?

Well, luckily you can't study 'pure geometry' at undergraduate level so that isn't a decision you have to make for the time being. Also, basing your career choice on the fact that you like to 'visualise' and that alone is silly. Life isn't that simple.

Last piece of advice: You'll quickly need to drop the act and grow up a big. Accepting that you aren't going to be the next Einstein isn't the point, the point is that you're the next *you* - you have no idea where you career is going to take you. Just because you happen to have heard of a few of the most famous physicists in history doesn't mean they're the only ones that have done something of merit, or something that has changed the world. When you have the machinery that an undergraduate degree gives you, it's actually reasonably easy to come up with something *new*, something that nobody has tried or even thought of before. I work in research, so I guess that's what I do - but it isn't the way I really think about it. For me, I enjoy the chase of building a program, letting it run on some data set and having a tense moment before displaying my plots to begin to find out if my new idea has 'worked'. I enjoy it for me.

Finally, to answer the title of your thread: Yes, completely but because you aren't yet at a stage where you can start to understand the kind of ideas you're talking about.

 

[Caramon]

Referring to anyone who was talking about taking Linear Algebra and Calculus in High School:

I was in an AP program in High School and graduated with University credits in Calculus I, Linear Algebra, and Classical Physics. University-level courses, Calculus I all the way up to l'hospital's rule, applications of integrals, etc. and Linear Algebra the actual first year-course.

It was by no means a requirement to graduate, I decided to get ahead by taking these courses in High School. Many people in my school barely passed Applied Math 30 and never took Physics. I just took a very advanced program that was offered because my school was "in the upper echelons".

 

[chill_factor]

Yes it is. Go into mechanical engineering, chemistry, anything but physics. You are me 4 years ago except I thought I was going to be the next biotech person, then I got real training in what biotech actually was. If you think something is so interesting and fun, it likely isn't. The most boring things are the most fun. The most fun things are the most boring.