I think your question here can be decomposed into several different questions. When asking why people choose something, you have to compare that choice to the alternatives. You posit that the alternatives to physics are math and computer science. I don’t see that. The more common alternatives for physics are biology and chemistry. In highschool I have to take one science course each year and one math course each year. I could choose between physics, chemistry, and biology. Those were the options. If someone grows up thinking they want to be a scientist, they major disciplines of science are typically considered physics, chemistry, biology, medicine. Why physics as opposed to biology is a very different question than why physics as opposed to math.
“Why physics?” is a question people will tend to have their own answers to, but I’ve watched a fair number of undergraduates, and a lot of the time it’s possible to identify the ones that will become physics majors, at least as opposed to majoring in chemistry/biology/premed. It’s harder to pick between physics majors and math majors. Lots of physics majors double major in math. Many computational physicists have degree in physics and computer science. Picking which students will becomes physicists versus chemists or doctors is relatively easy though, and it’s not a matter of intelligence. It is about attitude. Part of the physics attitude is summed up in the Feynman quote, “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
In most subjects, especially in biology and chemistry, the names of things are very important. A lot of work goes into learning the names of things, and those names stay pretty consistent. In physics that isn’t true. The letter V may be voltage in this problem, or velocity, or mass. It doesn’t matter. There are lots of students who if I write that a block 1 has a mass V1=5 kg will absolutely refuse to go any further. They can’t handle that. To me, and to many of the people that go on to study physics, that was a breath of fresh air. Finally, we’re learning ABOUT something, rather than just learning the name of something.
Physics allows you to make predictions about the world. How fast does something fall? Which parts of this socket can I safely stick my fingers into? Math doesn’t give you that. Computer science only allows you to predict how human created systems work. Physics allows me to understand the world, rigorously. I still remember learning that starfish are in phylum echinodermata. Maybe that’s a useful fact, but it doesn’t feel nearly as good as understanding that the frequency of a pendulum has to be sqrt(g/l) and not sqrt(l/g), because that’s the only way the units make sense.
I think you’re also underrating how useful studying physics is. Math is in general pretty difficult for me to learn. It’s abstract, and it isn’t always obvious to me where the rules are coming from. Almost all of the math I know more complicated than calculus I learned in physics classes. Even if I took a math class on a subject, it typically wasn’t until i covered in it a physics class that I really understood the concept. I may not use very many of the results of quantum mechanics on a day to day basis, but QM gave me a firm grounding in probability theory and in abstract vector spaces, and those are both useful concepts. I would probably disagree with your claim that thermodynamics (which I consider a chemistry course) is more useful than the more physics-oriented equivalent: statistical mechanics, since the latter covers not only heat engines, but also is a good introduction to both statistics and information theory. As a result of my physics education I can look at almost any object or machine and I have a pretty good guess as to how it works, from maglev trains to GPS satellites to MRI machines. That’s a pretty useful skill. I’m also really good at estimating the order of magnitude of numbers. That comes in handy too.
I don’t know anything about studying physics to signal intelligence, or studying physics because that’s where the smart people were. Until my social circle became predominantly comprised of physicists, the smartest people I knew were never physicists, and were never that impressed that I was studying physics. People who don’t consider themselves highly-intelligent who I meet in casual conversation do occasionally make the comment, “You study physics, you must be really smart.” but saying I look at models of phenomenon X in department Y, trying to predict Z is probably enough to get you branded as “really-smart” by most people.
Your P.S. is completely unsuprising. Premeds are in general terrible physics students. They’re very clever at patten matching and faking it, but you can trip them up with the most minor disruptions to the pattern, like using h as the variable for velocity instead of v. They’re like neural networks really. They interpolate really well, but they couldn’t extrapolate themselves out of an open paper bag.
No one pushed me into physics. No one suggested I study it. I studied history, philosophy, evolutionary biology, theology. I have an undergraduate degree in English, which a focus on poetry writing. But my graduate education is primarily in physics, with a hint of computer science. I’m haven’t been exposed to a strong social pressure towards physics, and I haven’t seen anything that would lead me to believe that people overvalue physics.
Math and computer science aren’t regarded as science. There’s no Bill Nye the Math Guy. Smart kids want to be scientists. Once you’ve decided to be a scientist, physics is a pretty natural choice.
I think your question here can be decomposed into several different questions. When asking why people choose something, you have to compare that choice to the alternatives. You posit that the alternatives to physics are math and computer science. I don’t see that. The more common alternatives for physics are biology and chemistry. In highschool I have to take one science course each year and one math course each year. I could choose between physics, chemistry, and biology. Those were the options. If someone grows up thinking they want to be a scientist, they major disciplines of science are typically considered physics, chemistry, biology, medicine. Why physics as opposed to biology is a very different question than why physics as opposed to math.
“Why physics?” is a question people will tend to have their own answers to, but I’ve watched a fair number of undergraduates, and a lot of the time it’s possible to identify the ones that will become physics majors, at least as opposed to majoring in chemistry/biology/premed. It’s harder to pick between physics majors and math majors. Lots of physics majors double major in math. Many computational physicists have degree in physics and computer science. Picking which students will becomes physicists versus chemists or doctors is relatively easy though, and it’s not a matter of intelligence. It is about attitude. Part of the physics attitude is summed up in the Feynman quote, “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
In most subjects, especially in biology and chemistry, the names of things are very important. A lot of work goes into learning the names of things, and those names stay pretty consistent. In physics that isn’t true. The letter V may be voltage in this problem, or velocity, or mass. It doesn’t matter. There are lots of students who if I write that a block 1 has a mass V1=5 kg will absolutely refuse to go any further. They can’t handle that. To me, and to many of the people that go on to study physics, that was a breath of fresh air. Finally, we’re learning ABOUT something, rather than just learning the name of something.
Physics allows you to make predictions about the world. How fast does something fall? Which parts of this socket can I safely stick my fingers into? Math doesn’t give you that. Computer science only allows you to predict how human created systems work. Physics allows me to understand the world, rigorously. I still remember learning that starfish are in phylum echinodermata. Maybe that’s a useful fact, but it doesn’t feel nearly as good as understanding that the frequency of a pendulum has to be sqrt(g/l) and not sqrt(l/g), because that’s the only way the units make sense.
I think you’re also underrating how useful studying physics is. Math is in general pretty difficult for me to learn. It’s abstract, and it isn’t always obvious to me where the rules are coming from. Almost all of the math I know more complicated than calculus I learned in physics classes. Even if I took a math class on a subject, it typically wasn’t until i covered in it a physics class that I really understood the concept. I may not use very many of the results of quantum mechanics on a day to day basis, but QM gave me a firm grounding in probability theory and in abstract vector spaces, and those are both useful concepts. I would probably disagree with your claim that thermodynamics (which I consider a chemistry course) is more useful than the more physics-oriented equivalent: statistical mechanics, since the latter covers not only heat engines, but also is a good introduction to both statistics and information theory. As a result of my physics education I can look at almost any object or machine and I have a pretty good guess as to how it works, from maglev trains to GPS satellites to MRI machines. That’s a pretty useful skill. I’m also really good at estimating the order of magnitude of numbers. That comes in handy too.
I don’t know anything about studying physics to signal intelligence, or studying physics because that’s where the smart people were. Until my social circle became predominantly comprised of physicists, the smartest people I knew were never physicists, and were never that impressed that I was studying physics. People who don’t consider themselves highly-intelligent who I meet in casual conversation do occasionally make the comment, “You study physics, you must be really smart.” but saying I look at models of phenomenon X in department Y, trying to predict Z is probably enough to get you branded as “really-smart” by most people.
Your P.S. is completely unsuprising. Premeds are in general terrible physics students. They’re very clever at patten matching and faking it, but you can trip them up with the most minor disruptions to the pattern, like using h as the variable for velocity instead of v. They’re like neural networks really. They interpolate really well, but they couldn’t extrapolate themselves out of an open paper bag.
No one pushed me into physics. No one suggested I study it. I studied history, philosophy, evolutionary biology, theology. I have an undergraduate degree in English, which a focus on poetry writing. But my graduate education is primarily in physics, with a hint of computer science. I’m haven’t been exposed to a strong social pressure towards physics, and I haven’t seen anything that would lead me to believe that people overvalue physics.
Math and computer science aren’t regarded as science. There’s no Bill Nye the Math Guy. Smart kids want to be scientists. Once you’ve decided to be a scientist, physics is a pretty natural choice.