I think the title should be “why study physicists” not “why study physics”. Because what you are describing is a gift certain physicists have, and others do not. I had it in high school (often when the teacher would state a problem in class, the only thing that was obvious from the beginning was the answer, not how to get to it), and it saved my bacon in grad school a few times many many years later. Recently it took my friend and me about 5 min of idle chatting to estimate the max feasible velocity of a centrifugal launch system, and where the bottlenecks might be (surprisingly, it is actually not the air resistance, and not the overheating, but the centrifugal g forces before launch which make single-stage-to-orbit impossible). John Wheeler famously said something like “only do a calculation once you know the result.” Einstein knew what he wanted out of General Relativity almost from the start, and it took him years and years to make the math work. This pattern applies in general, as well. A physicist has a vague qualitative model that “feels right”, and then finds the mathematical tools to make it work quantitatively, whether or not those tools are applied with any rigor. I don’t know if this skill can be analyzed or taught, it seems more like artistic talent.
I’m not so sure. I think a lot of physicists get better at this through practice, maybe especially in undergrad. I have a PhD in physics, and at this point I think I’m really good at figuring out the appropriate level of abstraction to use on something (something I’d put in the same category as the things mentioned in the OP.) I don’t totally trust my own recollection, but I think I was worse at this freshman year, and much more likely to pick e.g. continuum vs. discrete models of things in mechanics inappropriately and make life hard for myself.
I’m sure one can train this skill, to some degree at least. I don’t think I got better at it, but I did use “the appropriate level of abstraction” to get the numerical part of my thesis done without needing a lot of compute,
By the way, I agree that finding the appropriate level of abstraction is probably the core of what the OP describes.
Yeah, I also seem to have a knack for that (as good as anyone in my cohort at a top physics grad school, I have reason to believe), but I have no idea if I got it / developed it by doing lots of physics, or if I would have had it anyway. It’s hard to judge the counterfactual!
Hmm, I do vaguely remember, in early college, going from a place where I couldn’t reliably construct my own differential-type arguments in arbitrary domains (“if we increase the charge on the plate by dQ …” blah blah, wam bam, and now we have a differential equation), to where I could easily do so. Maybe that’s weak evidence that I got something generalizable out of physics?
I think the title should be “why study physicists” not “why study physics”. Because what you are describing is a gift certain physicists have, and others do not. I had it in high school (often when the teacher would state a problem in class, the only thing that was obvious from the beginning was the answer, not how to get to it), and it saved my bacon in grad school a few times many many years later. Recently it took my friend and me about 5 min of idle chatting to estimate the max feasible velocity of a centrifugal launch system, and where the bottlenecks might be (surprisingly, it is actually not the air resistance, and not the overheating, but the centrifugal g forces before launch which make single-stage-to-orbit impossible). John Wheeler famously said something like “only do a calculation once you know the result.” Einstein knew what he wanted out of General Relativity almost from the start, and it took him years and years to make the math work. This pattern applies in general, as well. A physicist has a vague qualitative model that “feels right”, and then finds the mathematical tools to make it work quantitatively, whether or not those tools are applied with any rigor. I don’t know if this skill can be analyzed or taught, it seems more like artistic talent.
I’m not so sure. I think a lot of physicists get better at this through practice, maybe especially in undergrad. I have a PhD in physics, and at this point I think I’m really good at figuring out the appropriate level of abstraction to use on something (something I’d put in the same category as the things mentioned in the OP.) I don’t totally trust my own recollection, but I think I was worse at this freshman year, and much more likely to pick e.g. continuum vs. discrete models of things in mechanics inappropriately and make life hard for myself.
I’m sure one can train this skill, to some degree at least. I don’t think I got better at it, but I did use “the appropriate level of abstraction” to get the numerical part of my thesis done without needing a lot of compute,
By the way, I agree that finding the appropriate level of abstraction is probably the core of what the OP describes.
Yeah, I also seem to have a knack for that (as good as anyone in my cohort at a top physics grad school, I have reason to believe), but I have no idea if I got it / developed it by doing lots of physics, or if I would have had it anyway. It’s hard to judge the counterfactual!
Hmm, I do vaguely remember, in early college, going from a place where I couldn’t reliably construct my own differential-type arguments in arbitrary domains (“if we increase the charge on the plate by dQ …” blah blah, wam bam, and now we have a differential equation), to where I could easily do so. Maybe that’s weak evidence that I got something generalizable out of physics?
Could you write a list of physicists which have such “gift”? Might be useful for analyzing that specific skill.