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superborbAs part of my ~continuing education~, I've been working through some of the physics that I never took. And I wonder if the reason that some people love physics/math (at the undergrad level) and some never understand it, is if they can fall in love with the feeling of the rightness of a solution, when they reach the point where they can look at a problem and the gravity of the correct path is apparent. Professors would call it building intuition; I always felt it was more the sense of how, in this framework, the universe operates. Oh, yes, this is right, any other path is inconsistent. A deep satisfaction.
Really, I should study pure math instead of physics, but I never reached the level of math where that feeling can guide me to correctness beyond the trivial. So math has always remained a tool in the hand, not intuition in the heart. But I see glimpses of it too, only for it to slip through my fingers. (I've taken around five higher level statistics courses, but I've never felt it beyond the mechanical. Sometimes though, algebra sings tantalizingly, like I might know her.)
Of course, the further from pure math, the less well this feeling serves. The social sciences can easily get seduced by this feeling, and it leaves them in bad places. Biology too-- and during this time, all the people hitting Dunning–Kruger level knowledge of immunology have learned a sharp lesson in that indeed!
Really, I should study pure math instead of physics, but I never reached the level of math where that feeling can guide me to correctness beyond the trivial. So math has always remained a tool in the hand, not intuition in the heart. But I see glimpses of it too, only for it to slip through my fingers. (I've taken around five higher level statistics courses, but I've never felt it beyond the mechanical. Sometimes though, algebra sings tantalizingly, like I might know her.)
Of course, the further from pure math, the less well this feeling serves. The social sciences can easily get seduced by this feeling, and it leaves them in bad places. Biology too-- and during this time, all the people hitting Dunning–Kruger level knowledge of immunology have learned a sharp lesson in that indeed!
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Date: 2022-04-09 14:23 (UTC)Math is still not my friend. I still panic when I see a big complicated equation, even if I know every component in it. But I love the things it allows me to do. And yeah, most of those things I do now don't actually have a singular solution. It's either a range, an approximation, or no possible solution at all! But the feeling of satisfaction persists. It just takes longer to get there :)
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Date: 2022-04-10 02:11 (UTC)