A lot of students pick their university degree by looking at the topics they enjoyed in school. If they enjoyed physics classes the most, they think that studying physics is their path.
But I rarely find myself using my physics intuition in the real world.
I think it’s pretty hard to say when I use my physics intuition because it provides some very basic beliefs about the universe. During a presentation on the history of the atomic bomb one of my teachers ask a fellow student for the basic elements of which things are made. She answered: Water, Fire, Earth and Air.
It wasn’t that she was stupid. She was quite good at humanities but she never learned really got the mental model of atoms.
Having a strong physics or chemistry education makes ideas like homeopathy seems strange which wouldn’t look as strange if you would have just had math and computer science classes in school.
On a related note, I recently asked on Quora the question In what ways is knowledge of Newtonian classical mechanics helpful to people pursuing biomedical research?
I’m studying bioinformatics.
Take learning Ohm’s law. That means you learn what resistance means. If you are in biomedical research that helps you to understand blood flow because you can model the resistance that slows down how much blood flows in certain tissues with the same formula.
If you read papers about Monta Carlo simulation you find words like temperature and talk about changing the temperature of the simulation. Thermodynamics gets used as analogy.
Physics has the advantage that a lot of people spent a lot of work into developing vocabulary, formula and proof things around the formula.
If you can say that your biochemical problem can be roughly approximated with something that physics people already studied than you can just copy their formula.
A lot of students pick their university degree by looking at the topics they enjoyed in school. If they enjoyed physics classes the most, they think that studying physics is their path.
I think it’s pretty hard to say when I use my physics intuition because it provides some very basic beliefs about the universe. During a presentation on the history of the atomic bomb one of my teachers ask a fellow student for the basic elements of which things are made. She answered: Water, Fire, Earth and Air.
It wasn’t that she was stupid. She was quite good at humanities but she never learned really got the mental model of atoms.
Having a strong physics or chemistry education makes ideas like homeopathy seems strange which wouldn’t look as strange if you would have just had math and computer science classes in school.
I’m studying bioinformatics.
Take learning Ohm’s law. That means you learn what resistance means. If you are in biomedical research that helps you to understand blood flow because you can model the resistance that slows down how much blood flows in certain tissues with the same formula.
If you read papers about Monta Carlo simulation you find words like temperature and talk about changing the temperature of the simulation. Thermodynamics gets used as analogy.
Physics has the advantage that a lot of people spent a lot of work into developing vocabulary, formula and proof things around the formula. If you can say that your biochemical problem can be roughly approximated with something that physics people already studied than you can just copy their formula.