So, as a grad student in physics I had a bunch of reactions to this post, most of which aren’t particularly coherent or well thought out. A few thoughts:
-As much as I don’t want to admit it, physics being at least somewhat overvalued among smart students seems plausible to me. To the extent that it is, my gut tells me it would mostly be due to intelligence signalling reasons, as you mentioned.
-What drives smart and curious students to physics? My initial reaction was to blink, and say “Why wouldn’t smart and curious students want to go into physics? Physics is awesome!” I suspect that most people who end up going into physics would have a similar reaction. They (we) just find it...sort of intrinsically interesting. In a more general sense though, what curious people end up curious about is probably a complicated function of their brain wiring and upbringing and whatnot, but it seems like a very common flavour for curiosity to take on is an interest in the fundamental. If you’re curious you want to understand how the world really works at the bottom level. Obviously people have different feelings on what the most “fundamental” field is (plausible cases can be made for math, philosophy, and computer science, I would say), but a significant number of people (including myself) would single out physics.
-Aren’t you cherry picking a bit with your math and computer science examples? What about a math student who focuses on differential geometry or number theory, or a CS major who focuses on computational complexity theory? Are they going to get many real-world skills out of their degree? They’ll get the basics in their first couple years, sure, but if that’s your criteria then I think physics is at least comparable—certainly you’ll learn just as much if not more in terms of applied math skills. I guess what I’m saying is, as long as you’re granting that abstract-seeming degrees can have value due to a) some base level of directly applicable skills you learn and b) intangible benefits from improved thinking, then it seems like physics would qualify just as much as Math/CS. All three can veer off into the wildly esoteric.
-On that note, I think you might be underestimating the degree to which physics teaches math skills. In physics we took a number of upper year math courses, which of course had a good number of math majors enrolled as well. Generally speaking, the physicists did just as well as the math majors, and in most cases noticeably better. An example: everyone I knew in physics found the 3rd year differential equations course to be a joke compared to our other courses. At the end of the year we were all surprised to learn that the class average was a mere C+. I can’t imagine that the average among physics majors was less than an A- (maybe B+). The pattern seemed to hold for all the of the applied math courses we took (naturally, the math majors seemed to outperform physicists in more traditionally “mathy” courses that I took, like analysis and advanced linear algebra). Based on my experience I don’t think physics hits diminishing returns on teaching mathematical modelling any more than math itself does (maybe Econ is better than both, I don’t know).
-Finally, I guess I should say that I personally feel like I got huge value out of my degree (my undergrad anyway—grad school, much less so). This I think is due to two main reasons. The first is just that physics is an incredibly intense and difficult degree—it’s like a boot camp for your brain. Four years of physics rewired my thinking and made me an immensely better problem solver. However, to the extent that that’s true, I think you could get similar benefits from another abstract degree, as long as it’s just as intensive. The second and more important reason is that physics hugely expanded my mental vocabulary of analogies, and ways of thinking about things. You saying that you don’t use physics intuitions in day-to-day life just seems bizarre to me—I use them all the time! I find it noticeably easier to talk to other physicists about complicated things, even if they’re not physics related, just because we have such a rich set of mutually understood analogies to draw on. So my subjective impressions differ from yours in this case.
On a more meta note: I hadn’t realized quite how much of my identity is tied up with being a physicist. Reading this post felt almost like an attack to me. I should probably try to get better at noticing that “under attack” feeling when it happens, and use it as a warning flag for identity politics being at play.
I agree that the general criticisms that I made of physics can also be leveled against most upper-division undergraduate mathematics courses (i.e., stuff that is generally taken only by math majors). That’s a topic that I plan to take up some other time. (As a math Ph.D., I certainly enjoyed a lot of upper-division mathematics).
What I think distinguishes physics from mathematics is that the diminishing returns from physics start setting in earlier than they do for mathematics, and the extent of applicability of physics is more limited (for instance, classical mechanics is somewhat useful, but not as much as calculus—and both are done at roughly the same educational stage).
Your answer, however, is an update in favor of physics having value.
What I think distinguishes physics from mathematics is that the diminishing returns from physics start setting in earlier than they do for mathematics, and the extent of applicability of physics is more limited (for instance, classical mechanics is somewhat useful, but not as much as calculus—and both are done at roughly the same educational stage).
This doesn’t seem obviously true to me. It seems like learning to model actual systems with differential equations and the like would be much more applicable than most upper level mathematics. And the math stuff that is more generally useful, like linear algebra, gets adequately covered in physics. (For what it’s worth, I’m a number theory grad student, and I minored in physics as an undergrad).
So, as a grad student in physics I had a bunch of reactions to this post, most of which aren’t particularly coherent or well thought out. A few thoughts:
-As much as I don’t want to admit it, physics being at least somewhat overvalued among smart students seems plausible to me. To the extent that it is, my gut tells me it would mostly be due to intelligence signalling reasons, as you mentioned.
-What drives smart and curious students to physics? My initial reaction was to blink, and say “Why wouldn’t smart and curious students want to go into physics? Physics is awesome!” I suspect that most people who end up going into physics would have a similar reaction. They (we) just find it...sort of intrinsically interesting. In a more general sense though, what curious people end up curious about is probably a complicated function of their brain wiring and upbringing and whatnot, but it seems like a very common flavour for curiosity to take on is an interest in the fundamental. If you’re curious you want to understand how the world really works at the bottom level. Obviously people have different feelings on what the most “fundamental” field is (plausible cases can be made for math, philosophy, and computer science, I would say), but a significant number of people (including myself) would single out physics.
-Aren’t you cherry picking a bit with your math and computer science examples? What about a math student who focuses on differential geometry or number theory, or a CS major who focuses on computational complexity theory? Are they going to get many real-world skills out of their degree? They’ll get the basics in their first couple years, sure, but if that’s your criteria then I think physics is at least comparable—certainly you’ll learn just as much if not more in terms of applied math skills. I guess what I’m saying is, as long as you’re granting that abstract-seeming degrees can have value due to a) some base level of directly applicable skills you learn and b) intangible benefits from improved thinking, then it seems like physics would qualify just as much as Math/CS. All three can veer off into the wildly esoteric.
-On that note, I think you might be underestimating the degree to which physics teaches math skills. In physics we took a number of upper year math courses, which of course had a good number of math majors enrolled as well. Generally speaking, the physicists did just as well as the math majors, and in most cases noticeably better. An example: everyone I knew in physics found the 3rd year differential equations course to be a joke compared to our other courses. At the end of the year we were all surprised to learn that the class average was a mere C+. I can’t imagine that the average among physics majors was less than an A- (maybe B+). The pattern seemed to hold for all the of the applied math courses we took (naturally, the math majors seemed to outperform physicists in more traditionally “mathy” courses that I took, like analysis and advanced linear algebra). Based on my experience I don’t think physics hits diminishing returns on teaching mathematical modelling any more than math itself does (maybe Econ is better than both, I don’t know).
-Finally, I guess I should say that I personally feel like I got huge value out of my degree (my undergrad anyway—grad school, much less so). This I think is due to two main reasons. The first is just that physics is an incredibly intense and difficult degree—it’s like a boot camp for your brain. Four years of physics rewired my thinking and made me an immensely better problem solver. However, to the extent that that’s true, I think you could get similar benefits from another abstract degree, as long as it’s just as intensive. The second and more important reason is that physics hugely expanded my mental vocabulary of analogies, and ways of thinking about things. You saying that you don’t use physics intuitions in day-to-day life just seems bizarre to me—I use them all the time! I find it noticeably easier to talk to other physicists about complicated things, even if they’re not physics related, just because we have such a rich set of mutually understood analogies to draw on. So my subjective impressions differ from yours in this case.
On a more meta note: I hadn’t realized quite how much of my identity is tied up with being a physicist. Reading this post felt almost like an attack to me. I should probably try to get better at noticing that “under attack” feeling when it happens, and use it as a warning flag for identity politics being at play.
Thanks for your response.
I agree that the general criticisms that I made of physics can also be leveled against most upper-division undergraduate mathematics courses (i.e., stuff that is generally taken only by math majors). That’s a topic that I plan to take up some other time. (As a math Ph.D., I certainly enjoyed a lot of upper-division mathematics).
What I think distinguishes physics from mathematics is that the diminishing returns from physics start setting in earlier than they do for mathematics, and the extent of applicability of physics is more limited (for instance, classical mechanics is somewhat useful, but not as much as calculus—and both are done at roughly the same educational stage).
Your answer, however, is an update in favor of physics having value.
This doesn’t seem obviously true to me. It seems like learning to model actual systems with differential equations and the like would be much more applicable than most upper level mathematics. And the math stuff that is more generally useful, like linear algebra, gets adequately covered in physics. (For what it’s worth, I’m a number theory grad student, and I minored in physics as an undergrad).