Why is physics so hard

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When I ask someone about physics, they often say "physics is hard". But, if I ask the reason, they do not know the exact How long does it take to boil water without any interruption?

January 16, Latest Posts. Sandeepa Dev Rukshan - October 25, 0. It has been in existence since the early s and October 2, Why is school important — Reasons you never knew September 16, October 25, Why is Physics so Hard to learn as an interesting subject? November 14, What is post-secondary degree mean? February 3, Instead of studying this and figuring out their mistakes, students will usually just take a quick picture of the solutions using their phone.

Of course they ask if it's OK to take a snapshot first, and I let them. However, the problem is that they think of the solution as something to collect rather than something to learn from. Here is the most important lesson for physics students and really all students. The learning process is difficult. If learning was easy they would call it pie as easy as pie—although I don't really understand that line. If a student is doing homework or studying and there is no struggle, there is no learning.

Without confusion, the student either already understood it or never tried. This comes back to my favorite line:. Confusion is the sweat of learning.

You can't just google a physics solution and expect to learn. Imagine if Luke Skywalker had access to the Internet on Dagobah. Here's what would have happened when his x-wing sunk beneath the water. Yoda: So certain are you? Always with you what cannot be done. Do you nothing that I say?

Luke: Master moving stones around is one thing, but this is entirely different. But let me just Google "how to lift an x-wing with the Force. Once you can do that, your understanding should be high enough to enable you to work through problems that need the understanding of the theory, but for which a cookbook like approach simply plug in equation XXX for problems of type YYY, almost never works. If you have a really good understanding of equation XXX, how it was arrived at etc.

I think the biggest thing about physics, is its mostly about a mode of thinking, and secondarily about the detailed material. Watch how those who are good at it descibe how they solve problems, hopefully some of their thinking style can be learned.

Physics is about the ability to predict the outcome of scenarios. Either with formulas, simulation, or good old curve fitting. The underlying principles a few basic ones, but to use them you required to understand higher lever math, so to make it "easy", basic physics classes boil it down to a cookbook method. Add one of this, two of this, mix and voila here is the result. That is not how physics supposed to be, and it is a pitty you are stuck in such a situation.

My suggestion is to bear with it, until you discover some of the commonalities by yourself and find your own way of making sense of the world. The relevant concepts involved may not have been properly explained to you in sufficient detail for you to manipulate them easily. Have you considered using a book with very clear definitions and many worked examples, like Schaum's outline series?

They get surprisingly good reviews. The way I see it, there are two aspects to the practice of science, there is a constructive one and a destructive one.

Let me try to expand on that. The destructive one is the easiest to explain and usually the one on which a fair amount of time is spent. It is basically the skeptical part of science, the one where you test one idea against another. The constructive or creative aspect is the hardest part. We don't have a systematic approach to it, basically, all we do is just try.

The reason some people are more successful than others at doing this is experience, they can immediately select the potentially successful ideas from a larger set of ideas, without going through all the steps of the destructive part.

Or they just are willing to spend so much more time on working on the subject, giving up on many other activities, which of course forges experience. Now, one might say that these two aspects are not necessarily exclusive to physics, which is true. An artist has to go through the same motions, but the criteria are different.

Nature is a harsh mistress, and that's why physics is so difficult. We can come up with lots of ideas, but nature doesn't care about how creative we are, if the idea doesn't work it doesn't work.

I'd say sciences in general are difficult because of this. If you didn't encounter the problem in other sciences yet, it's because you are still at a more elementary study level in them as compared to physics.

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Learn more. Why is Physics so hard? Asked 10 years, 11 months ago. Active 4 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 18k times. Improve this question.

Snowman Snowman 1, 7 7 gold badges 21 21 silver badges 25 25 bronze badges. It's not really about physics, it's about the way people think and learn. It is a good question given the right forum I'm voting to close.

It's not enough to know what a for-loop is and how it works to become a good programmer. That requires lots of practice. You can't express this question using equations, it doesn't concern an experiment, it can't be answered by applying a physical theory. It's a question about learning , specifically about learning a particular subject, which just happens to be physics.

You could ask the same question about any other subject, if that happened to be the one you were having trouble with.

I had the tools, because I had solved all the problems, but not the large picture. Probably this is your problem with physics, that you have the detail tools and are missing the forest for the trees.

Try reading a physics book as if it is a novel, to see the large framework. This will help you when meeting new problems to assign them to the correct framework, in my opinion of course.