We are star stuff harvesting star light

[lowk]

I think I am approaching one of the most fundamental choices in my life, one that may well determine an awful lot about my future. By the start of next year I am going to have to choose whether to become a biological or a physical scientist.

Comments

[lifes_a_dream]

Well obviously I would advice you to go fo Biology, since I detest Physics...but that's not exactly unbaised advice!!

I guess you could think about what you want to do as a career - but then again, most people our age don't really know yet! I think the advice someone gave above, "think of which one you would miss the most", is good.

I'm sure you'll be happy whatever decision you make! And remember, you can change subjects after a few weeks if you start the lectures and hate them.

xx

[erica_freak]

Well, I was in the same situation about this time last year

[erica_freak]

Also biology is just a name for a small section of the many wonderful consequences of physics :o)

From what you write I think we have very similar views of science, and I think I would have been very disappointed if I'd carried on with biology much longer. The interesting bits are all discoverable and understandable without having studied it in unbearable depth, whereas the interestign bits of physics become more interesting when you know more (because "more" means "why?" rather than "shall we give this part of this enzyme a long and unpronounceable name?")

Physicsphysicsphysics :o)

[lowk]

Ok sorry this is a really long reply, and is mostly me working things through in my head, so don’t feel that you have to read it. Thanks for your comments :-)

Also biology is just a name for a small section of the many wonderful consequences of physics I used to think that for a long time, I never considered biology as a science at all, just stamp collecting, naming and cataloguing. I was very surprised to realise how that really wasn't true, and that most of Biology doesn't rest on physics at all, (especially the type of biology I'm interested in - mostly natural history and that type of thing), except in the trivial sense that all things must be consequences of physics. When you look at ecology and evolution you rarely refer to the basic physical laws (though you do sometimes, and that is also completely fascinating). This is the kind of level I am interested in, biochemistry doesn't interest me an awful lot except as a tool, rather than a subject in itself (though I also see why people would be attracted to it, I'm just really not

blinkered?????????

[kwanyin2004]

Blinkered? Definition please. Is that a Cambridge saying? Can I steal it?

Re: blinkered?????????

[lowk]

When you ride a horse, and especially if it is racing, you do not want to get distracted by things on the road. You don't want it to investigate, or even be aware or things around it. Instead, you just want it to march forward, unaware of anything but the track ahead of it. To do this, you give it blinkers, which you put around it's eyes to stop it seeing other things. A horse like this is described as blinkered.

Blinkered as a metaphor generally means a way of thinking that only looks straight forwards, focusing on only a small set of things, without considering the wider consequences.

It's not a Cambridge expression, but it might be a British one.

[sadisticjackass]

physics or ethics/biology...

[lowk]

ethics?

[sadisticjackass]

Ehh cough cough I realize that wasn't an option, but bioethics is pretty amazing.

[lowk]

Bioethics can be a pretty interesting subject in it's own right, but I feel that the vast majority of people who talk about bioethics tend to be quite ignorant people, who suffer from what Dawkins called "the conceit of the discontinuous mind".

Also, ethics isn't a science, and probably never will be, due to the fact that there is no way to go from the studies of How and Why that are science, to the studies of Ought that are ethics. Hume's fallacy and all.

Hello, by the way. You're a Convert_me person, aren't you?

[pincushions]

I found the choice hard last year - and this year too really. And I was lucky that I was really only choosing the third subject (although to be honest, I suspected at the time that I was really choosing what I'd be doing in the end rather than what to do in IB