Young Australian Skeptics

I posted this originally as a comment on Blag Hag, after Jen posted about her…disillusionment with physics; I’m reposting it here to remind people that science — even the very abstract stuff — is fascinating. Comment below the fold:

Poorly taught physics — scratch that, ANY scientific discipline — is horrible. It took me a year off and a year of undergraduate law to realise that what I actually wanted to study was science (in particular, maths and physics). All because high school made me think I’d never, ever want to touch science again.

There’s a lot of fascinating stuff in physics even before you get to the stuff Brian Greene likes to talk about. Even the mathematics…especially the mathematics, when it is well taught can reveal an underlying beauty and structure that is not entirely apparent on the surface.

That’s not to say that everyone should be a physicist (just as not everyone should be a mathematician, or a musician, or a writer) — but try not to let poor teaching and administration dull the excitement inherent in even the simplest discoveries. When you start to lose your shit and can’t see the excitement in electromagnetism, remember this one fact:

Everything we associate with the modern world, everything we take for granted — from air travel to the internet, to television to the fundamental glue of chemistry — all of it relies of four simple equations: Maxwell’s equations.

If you ever find yourself losing motivation, watch this man — you could do worse as a tutor:

Tags: maths, Maxwells Equation, Physics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Richard Hughes, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.