In general, science is only boring when you don’t understand it.
Even people who love science often regard areas other than their field of expertise as dull. In reality, I suspect that if they took the time to better understand those “dull” specialties they’d find them fascinating as well.
It goes without saying that things you can’t comprehend are boring regardless of their actual content- nobody wants to re-read their favorite 1,000 page novel as a PGP encrypted string for example. It’s also a fact that scientists don’t have the knowledge to comprehend the interesting bits in a field they haven’t specialized in. So there’s no plausible route by which people could really know if a field they lack expertise in truly would be dull to them or not, even if it would in fact be dull: they must be assuming it to be dull despite a lack of comprehension. I could be wrong about the cause and effect, but I could not have reversed it. This raises the question of how people get into a field at all in the first place, when it’s still gibberish to them.
To be honest though, I was merely generalizing from my own experience. I’ve yet to find any branch of science that didn’t fascinate me upon close inspection- I’ve been in many situations where I had no real choice but to study something in detail which i didn’t expect to be interesting but needed the knowledge towards a specific end goal. Every time it seemed initially dull and pointless while I was struggling with the nomenclature and basic concepts, until I reached a critical point whereby it became intensely interesting.
However, it’s true that I’ve chosen to do inter-disciplinary work, and that could be due to me having some unusual trait whereby everything is interesting to me.
In general, science is only boring when you don’t understand it.
Even people who love science often regard areas other than their field of expertise as dull. In reality, I suspect that if they took the time to better understand those “dull” specialties they’d find them fascinating as well.
Carefully, you might have reversed cause and effect there.
It goes without saying that things you can’t comprehend are boring regardless of their actual content- nobody wants to re-read their favorite 1,000 page novel as a PGP encrypted string for example. It’s also a fact that scientists don’t have the knowledge to comprehend the interesting bits in a field they haven’t specialized in. So there’s no plausible route by which people could really know if a field they lack expertise in truly would be dull to them or not, even if it would in fact be dull: they must be assuming it to be dull despite a lack of comprehension. I could be wrong about the cause and effect, but I could not have reversed it. This raises the question of how people get into a field at all in the first place, when it’s still gibberish to them.
To be honest though, I was merely generalizing from my own experience. I’ve yet to find any branch of science that didn’t fascinate me upon close inspection- I’ve been in many situations where I had no real choice but to study something in detail which i didn’t expect to be interesting but needed the knowledge towards a specific end goal. Every time it seemed initially dull and pointless while I was struggling with the nomenclature and basic concepts, until I reached a critical point whereby it became intensely interesting.
However, it’s true that I’ve chosen to do inter-disciplinary work, and that could be due to me having some unusual trait whereby everything is interesting to me.