Why do people think physics is so hard?

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If you think it's easy then you haven't taken a real physics class...
 
Because it's math-y and not totally memorize-able, which can put a lot of people off. It's not that bad, in my opinion.
 
Personally, I'm a Bio major that aced Physics, but it was a real pain.

I'm just guessing here, but I think Physics is hard because a lot of people (including myself) don't remember the rules for trig and calculus. The math majors in my Physics II course had trouble visualizing the problems, and without a decent picture, be it mental or on paper, a problem can feel impossible.

And one last thing, I hate how anything in trig can mean 12 other things in trig, so you have to convert it to the right form to make a problem doable.
 
If you think it's easy, good for you! Why do you care if others think it's hard?
 
Lets put you in a "Physics for Scientists and Engineers" course rather than a "general" physics course, and you will have your question answered.
 
GomerPyle said:
Lets put you in a "Physics for Scientists and Engineers" course rather than a "general" physics course, and you will have your question answered.
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I took physics for engineers as I am an engineer. I just don't see what's so difficult? The concepts are simple and so is the math.
 
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GomerPyle said:
Lets put you in a "Physics for Scientists and Engineers" course rather than a "general" physics course, and you will have your question answered.
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This. I thought I was terrible at physics and bombed the course (for scientists and engineers) when I took it and switched to a bio program because of it, so I was terrified about the physics section of the MCAT. Well, I got a 14 on the PS section, oh gen phys. I scored a lot poorer than what I was expecting on the BS though...oh orgo...whatever.
 
pre-med physics and even physics for engineers is child's play compared to upper level physics courses. i am convinced that true physicists are geniuses.
 
sliceofbread136 said:
I took physics for engineers as I am an engineer. I just don't see what's so difficult? The concepts are simple and so is the math.
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It's simple because you're an engineer. If I had majored in physics, engineering, or something similar, I'd be pretty baller doing basic physics problems as well. I learned trigonometry in Junior year of high school. I didn't use it again until Junior year of college (for gen physics).
 
Gen Chem 2 was the hardest pre-req IMO.
 
Have you ever taken statistical mechanics or quantum mechanics? Nuclear physics? Those courses are what make physics hard. Engineering physics is all "plug and chug". Try deriving Coulomb's law from Maxwell's equations and a couple vector calc identities. If you can do that, then you can say physics is "easy".
 
Wait a minute...are we under a bridge, where the trolls do live?
 
thoimis said:
Have you ever taken statistical mechanics or quantum mechanics? Nuclear physics? Those courses are what make physics hard. Engineering physics is all "plug and chug". Try deriving Coulomb's law from Maxwell's equations and a couple vector calc identities. If you can do that, then you can say physics is "easy".
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Have you ever opened an aerospace or electrical engineering book?
 
Go read The Elegant Universe. Modern theoretical physics is insanely complex.
 
For calc physics, I think some people had a terrible pre-calculus background from high school which results in a poor grasp of calculus. For algebra physics, I have no clue 😕, most of my friends who took that just memorized the equations and aced.
 
JasonicBoom said:
This. I thought I was terrible at physics and bombed the course (for scientists and engineers) when I took it and switched to a bio program because of it, so I was terrified about the physics section of the MCAT. Well, I got a 14 on the PS section, oh gen phys. I scored a lot poorer than what I was expecting on the BS though...oh orgo...whatever.
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are you me?
except i picked chem
 
Many students enter physics with a weak foundation in math, problem solving, and general analytical skills. Most physics teachers are varying degrees of lousy, and aren't up to the task of helping their students catch up. Everyone loses.
 
InThisThread: "Why does everyone struggle at stuff my vast brain finds so easy?"
 
You can write down all the known laws of physics on one page using compact language of mathematics, and the equations look very elegant.

Now you have to explain all the observed phenomenon using these simple laws of nature. That involves seriese of steps of logical deduction using mathematics. But then there may be anomolous observation, and actually the observation cannot be explained from the known laws of physics. On the other hand may be there is an error in the observation itself; you might have heard that recently CERN anounced that they found neutrinos travelling faster than speed of light contrary to Einstein's hypothesis. But they found that there were experimental glitches. Experimenters were not dumb; they were world class at the best laboratory in the world. If anomolous observations, that is observations that do not fit the present model of nature, one needs to make changes so that new observation is explained without insonsitancy with explaination of other phenomenon. Many times change is simple but subtle, and escapes greatest of minds. Guass missed a simple idea that electric charge is conserved while with that simple idea Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. Poincare and Lorentz almost had right stuff. Einstein realized that what is true for Maxwell equation should be universal and should be true for Newton's laws as well. Simple but profound, and no reason why Poincare or Lorentz couldn't have taken that step forward.

Two kind of difficuties.

Explaining complexity from simple laws is the difficulty at the level of students solving every day problems in text books.

Realizing simple subtle change in laws consistent with complex set of observed facts is the difficulty of a physicist at the level of Nobel Prize.

First is hard and second is harder.

Remembering equations without understanding the content of equation is the mistake undergrads make; this, however, may be useful in getting quick answer in multiple choice questions. If you understand equations well you don't have to remember so many of them.
 
sliceofbread136 said:
O ya he's mad. 😡

Maybe I should've been more specific: why do people think physics 1 and 2 are hard?
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I would suppose because people are very different. There are people who are good at physics, people who are bad at physics, and people who fail physics and post gloating threads on SDN to make themselves feel better.
 
CeeEstee0 said:
I would suppose because people are very different. There are people who are good at physics, people who are bad at physics, and people who fail physics and post gloating threads on SDN to make themselves feel better.
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Who's the last one? Is it you?
 
TeeHeHe said:
After nearly 700 posts on SDN, I can't for the life of me determine why you would think this needed to be a new thread.
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This.

But seriously, the reason is just that any class involving any level of math thrusts a certain subset of students into hysteria. They are sometimes distinct from the ones who hate orgo, but more often than not they are one and the same.
 
Well, I never really meant for this topic to be insulting to anyone. So in retrospect, I guess I should apologize. The reason I made this thread was that I was reading through another thread asking about taking physics over the summer. Everyone there was saying you have to have some prior exposure to physics before you take the class and you need to devote like 35 hours a week to the subject. Why does physics carry this much stigma as opposed to something like general chemistry? I would say they both are the same level of difficulty, but no one really freaks out about gen chem.
 
Again, it drives me nuts when people post **** like this. Taking one introductory physics course at one school, getting an A and thinking physics is easy. Physics (or any course for that matter) can be so different from one school to another that there is no way you can make this generalization by simply taking one physics segment. Were you taking algebra based or calc based? Did your school teach conceptual physics or were you simply able to memorize how to do problems without having a clue in hell why you were doing what you were doing? So many people get A's in their physics courses and then do horribly on the MCAT PS and wonder why. If you found physics easy you probably didn't learn it the right way.
 
shoehornlettuce said:
Again, it drives me nuts when people post **** like this. Taking one introductory physics course at one school, getting an A and thinking physics is easy. Physics (or any course for that matter) can be so different from one school to another that there is no way you can make this generalization by simply taking one physics segment. Were you taking algebra based or calc based? Did your school teach conceptual physics or were you simply able to memorize how to do problems without having a clue in hell why you were doing what you were doing? So many people get A's in their physics courses and then do horribly on the MCAT PS and wonder why. If you found physics easy you probably didn't learn it the right way.
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I took engineering physics 1 and 2 with calc. I also got a 14 on MCAT PS. Also see my above post.
 
Cinclus said:
Because it's math-y and not totally memorize-able, which can put a lot of people off. It's not that bad, in my opinion.
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THIS

The vast majority of college kids cram before exams and memorize, and well, physics doesn't cater to that valuable need they have...so it makes a lot of sense why people who cram the night before have a hard time, compared to most other disciplines.

Basically you have to understand concepts, which is something you have to sit down and learn, which leads to low averages on exams.
 
sliceofbread136 said:
O ya he's mad. 😡

Maybe I should've been more specific: why do people think physics 1 and 2 are hard?
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Yea, I'm mad. I got an A in both engineering physics, and did well enough on my MCAT to get into 7 medical schools. Why don't you apply and come back and tell us how you do?


Just because you were good at something doesn't mean its easy for everyone. This brings up the point: You'll make a terrible doctor.

Kidding about the doctor part ;-)
 
raltima07 said:
Yea, I'm mad. I got an A in both engineering physics, and did well enough on my MCAT to get into 7 medical schools. Why don't you apply and come back and tell us how you do?


Just because you were good at something doesn't mean its easy for everyone. This brings up the point: You'll make a terrible doctor.

Kidding about the doctor part ;-)
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I don't really want to have a pissing contest.
 
raltima07 said:
Yea, I'm mad. I got an A in both engineering physics, and did well enough on my MCAT to get into 7 medical schools. Why don't you apply and come back and tell us how you do?


Just because you were good at something doesn't mean its easy for everyone. This brings up the point: You'll make a terrible doctor.

Kidding about the doctor part ;-)
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Isn't there some sort of term on SDN to describe how a person will fail to become a doctor because of another flaw/trait/thing he did? I forgot what it was
 
maybe because men typically find physics much more interesting and easier (and men only make up 50% of the population). I loved physics!

As interpreted from the woman in medicine thread:

This can be explained by the fact that woman were historically excluded from the hard sciences, and not supported at a young age in the fields of math and sciences. Furthermore, they lack female institutional leaders in this field. Obviously, Woman should automatically get 50% of the A's because of this institutionalized discrimination.
 
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Holy FranZ said:
maybe because men typically find physics much more interesting and easier (and men only make up 50% of the population). I loved physics!

As interpreted from the woman in medicine thread:

This can be explained by the fact that woman were historically excluded from the hard sciences, and not supported at a young age in the field of math and sciences. Furthermore, they lack female institutional leaders in this field. Obviously, Woman should automatically get 50% of the A's because of this institutionalized discrimination.
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:laugh: Well let's see, my mom is a professional mathematician, (so is my dad) so I had support at home, my hero as a child was Rosalind Franklin, and I took the three semester sequence of physics for physics majors and according to my transcript, I got 3 A+s. I think I enjoyed it also. :meanie:

Oh, I also helped some of the boys in the class with the optics and relativity homework. 😉
 
plumazul said:
:laugh: Well let's see, my mom is a professional mathematician, (so is my dad) so I had support at home, my hero as a child was Rosalind Franklin, and I took the three semester sequence of physics for physics majors and according to my transcript, I got 3 A+s. I think I enjoyed it also. :meanie:

Oh, I also helped some of the boys in the class with the optics and relativity homework. 😉
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occupy_wall_street_we_are_the_1_bumper_sticker-p128343562534105438z74sk_400.jpg

[you]
😀
 
OP's understanding of physics is counterbalanced with a lack of understanding in basic differences in people....
 
Your question fails to recognize the complexities that frame the issue.

Every individual comes into a physics course with a highly variable set of skills.

For example:
Some have previous exposure to physics or other related sciences.
Everyone has varying mathematical abilities.
Some individuals are better at mental visualization, which is helpful for physics.
Some just enjoy the subject more than others. Actually liking physics and believing that you can do well in the course goes a long way towards mastering the material.
Instructor effectiveness and course difficulty vary everywhere.
People respond differently to various instructional methods.
Individuals have more or less learning resources.
Some people waste there study time on the internet....
Etc., etc...
 
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