Paean
I am majoring in physics. Why on earth would a person do that? I'm not sure how many of my friends actually have any idea why the subject appeals to me, since I don't talk about it much around people who aren't also physics majors. Here is an attempt at explanation.
To many people, physics sounds like a terrible thing to study. It consists of math--a subject most people remember from high school as simultaneously boring, irrelevant, and frustrating--applied to, well, boring shit. Most people don't have any strong investment in understanding how inanimate objects move, and wouldn't sign up to study such a subject even if there weren't any math involved. This is all perfectly understandable, so let's begin with a metaphor, to jolt ourselves loose from these associations.
Imagine you're playing with a toy. It has lots of little snapping parts and buzzing parts and different pieces that fit together and it is a tremendous amount of fun. You like exploring the different things it can do, poking and prodding different parts of it and seeing what will happen. It's designed to be comprehensible to children, so it's not very hard to figure out the logic behind it--after a bit of messing around, you find yourself able to predict how it will respond to your pokes and re-configurations.
You, however, are not a child but an adult, and you are a little embarrassed to be sitting around playing with toys. Something feels indulgent not only about the uselessness of the whole activity, but about how skilled you have become at manipulating the toy. The friendly, hand-holding consistency of its behavior is, as all good adults know, nothing like the real world. The real world is complicated, full of unpredictability and contingency. This is part of why the toy is so fun. In its little world you can revisit, if only briefly, a fantasy only fully able to be entertained by children: the fantasy that one really knows what's going on. It's a nice respite, you think, but you'd better be getting back to grown-up matters soon.
And then--
Someone (an adult, one older and more authoritative than you) tells you something bizarre. It has been discovered that the toy you are holding has the power of prophecy. It has been conjectured that its structure and dynamics, which you found so simple and comforting as to seem artificial, mirror the structure and dynamics of reality at the most fundamental level. Your facility with the toy is now both a lucrative skill and an insight into the underlying structure of the world you live in. You had held in mind a dichotomy between the simple, predictable, and playful, which can only exist in fantasy and therefore is fundamentally childish, and the complex, confusing, and painful, which constitutes the reality that adults inhabit. But, bafflingly, the two ends of the spectrum have now met. At the bottom of it all, that intuitive, familiar, comfortable sort of reasoning, in which you really do know what's going on . . . that reasoning is how the world works.
Long ago you had left behind that sense of familiarity. You had associated it, as many adults do, with complacency, with the naive expectation that things will "work out" in a way that (we say with a knowing sigh) they never do. But now, this wonderful notion, this thing too good to be hoped for, this inversion so unexpected as to seem almost obscene: that the world is made of things working out.
Of course, the toy is math, and the prophetic power is physics. The dislocating revelation described above really happened to me, sometime in 12th grade. I wasn't even very good at math. It was, like history, one of the subjects in which my incompetence made me greatly embarrassed for much of middle and high school. The realization was more general. It was simply the understanding that the "hard sciences"--the subjects that one feels should be counter-intuitive and unforgiving exercises in grown-upness--were really just sets of straightforward concepts which snapped together like so many LEGO bricks.
So, in college, you get to choose your major. You can choose the humanities or the social sciences. There you will select phenomena to study, read disparate and bickering academic accounts of them, and try to synthesize those accounts, never achieving complete success. You will find yourself face-to-face, every day, with the "complex, confusing, painful" chaos that is adult life, and you will find that there are no fully uncontroversial tools for wresting something comprehensible out of the mess. All the while, you will be told without end that your area of study is "useless," and you will be buffeted to and fro by ideologues of all stripes, who question the value of your education because of its political implications, or lack thereof.
You can also major in physics. There you will play with toys all day. You will learn about systems that cohere in the way that only human creations are supposed to be able to. (An orderly musical piece, says the adult, has this sort of coherence--or a sentence whose words are well-chosen. But, the adult continues, it doesn't appear outside of our own artificial creations.) And when you're done playing games for the day, they'll tell you that your games are keys to technological progress and to comprehension of the universe. (You will never quite be able to believe it.)
Which are you going to choose?
And I know mathematics doesn't seem like a fun toy to most people. I think most people start to dislike math for one of two reasons--either because it seems useless and irrelevant to life, or because they get lost at some point and never get back on track. The former issue isn't a problem if you study physics. The latter is a sadly inevitable result of the fact that math is a really vertical subject, where every concept builds on the last one.
If you're one of those people who got lost at some point, just bear with me for a moment. You don't understand math, but that's not what's important. What's important is that you could, if you put your mind to it. The social world, and even the academic world insofar as it involves writing prose and speaking, demand performances from us which depend on aspects of ourselves we cannot control. It is difficult to undo the effects of one's upbringing, and differences of class and culture tend to write themselves all over the way we write, talk, and act, whether we want them to or not. But in math, the rules of expression are explicitly prescribed, so that there's no room for one's personal characteristics to slip in. And to learn math one needs only the basic sorts of thought which are the endowment of every human. (Don't think of logarithms! Think about the way you decide when to get out of bed in the morning, or the way you reason about your friends' behavior. If you can do that, you can, in principle, do math.) It is a heartening fact that the book of nature is written in this universal language of curious children, which because it is pre-linguistic and pre-socialization is powerless to prevent any human being from learning it.
To many people, physics sounds like a terrible thing to study. It consists of math--a subject most people remember from high school as simultaneously boring, irrelevant, and frustrating--applied to, well, boring shit. Most people don't have any strong investment in understanding how inanimate objects move, and wouldn't sign up to study such a subject even if there weren't any math involved. This is all perfectly understandable, so let's begin with a metaphor, to jolt ourselves loose from these associations.
Imagine you're playing with a toy. It has lots of little snapping parts and buzzing parts and different pieces that fit together and it is a tremendous amount of fun. You like exploring the different things it can do, poking and prodding different parts of it and seeing what will happen. It's designed to be comprehensible to children, so it's not very hard to figure out the logic behind it--after a bit of messing around, you find yourself able to predict how it will respond to your pokes and re-configurations.
You, however, are not a child but an adult, and you are a little embarrassed to be sitting around playing with toys. Something feels indulgent not only about the uselessness of the whole activity, but about how skilled you have become at manipulating the toy. The friendly, hand-holding consistency of its behavior is, as all good adults know, nothing like the real world. The real world is complicated, full of unpredictability and contingency. This is part of why the toy is so fun. In its little world you can revisit, if only briefly, a fantasy only fully able to be entertained by children: the fantasy that one really knows what's going on. It's a nice respite, you think, but you'd better be getting back to grown-up matters soon.
And then--
Someone (an adult, one older and more authoritative than you) tells you something bizarre. It has been discovered that the toy you are holding has the power of prophecy. It has been conjectured that its structure and dynamics, which you found so simple and comforting as to seem artificial, mirror the structure and dynamics of reality at the most fundamental level. Your facility with the toy is now both a lucrative skill and an insight into the underlying structure of the world you live in. You had held in mind a dichotomy between the simple, predictable, and playful, which can only exist in fantasy and therefore is fundamentally childish, and the complex, confusing, and painful, which constitutes the reality that adults inhabit. But, bafflingly, the two ends of the spectrum have now met. At the bottom of it all, that intuitive, familiar, comfortable sort of reasoning, in which you really do know what's going on . . . that reasoning is how the world works.
Long ago you had left behind that sense of familiarity. You had associated it, as many adults do, with complacency, with the naive expectation that things will "work out" in a way that (we say with a knowing sigh) they never do. But now, this wonderful notion, this thing too good to be hoped for, this inversion so unexpected as to seem almost obscene: that the world is made of things working out.
Of course, the toy is math, and the prophetic power is physics. The dislocating revelation described above really happened to me, sometime in 12th grade. I wasn't even very good at math. It was, like history, one of the subjects in which my incompetence made me greatly embarrassed for much of middle and high school. The realization was more general. It was simply the understanding that the "hard sciences"--the subjects that one feels should be counter-intuitive and unforgiving exercises in grown-upness--were really just sets of straightforward concepts which snapped together like so many LEGO bricks.
So, in college, you get to choose your major. You can choose the humanities or the social sciences. There you will select phenomena to study, read disparate and bickering academic accounts of them, and try to synthesize those accounts, never achieving complete success. You will find yourself face-to-face, every day, with the "complex, confusing, painful" chaos that is adult life, and you will find that there are no fully uncontroversial tools for wresting something comprehensible out of the mess. All the while, you will be told without end that your area of study is "useless," and you will be buffeted to and fro by ideologues of all stripes, who question the value of your education because of its political implications, or lack thereof.
You can also major in physics. There you will play with toys all day. You will learn about systems that cohere in the way that only human creations are supposed to be able to. (An orderly musical piece, says the adult, has this sort of coherence--or a sentence whose words are well-chosen. But, the adult continues, it doesn't appear outside of our own artificial creations.) And when you're done playing games for the day, they'll tell you that your games are keys to technological progress and to comprehension of the universe. (You will never quite be able to believe it.)
Which are you going to choose?
And I know mathematics doesn't seem like a fun toy to most people. I think most people start to dislike math for one of two reasons--either because it seems useless and irrelevant to life, or because they get lost at some point and never get back on track. The former issue isn't a problem if you study physics. The latter is a sadly inevitable result of the fact that math is a really vertical subject, where every concept builds on the last one.
If you're one of those people who got lost at some point, just bear with me for a moment. You don't understand math, but that's not what's important. What's important is that you could, if you put your mind to it. The social world, and even the academic world insofar as it involves writing prose and speaking, demand performances from us which depend on aspects of ourselves we cannot control. It is difficult to undo the effects of one's upbringing, and differences of class and culture tend to write themselves all over the way we write, talk, and act, whether we want them to or not. But in math, the rules of expression are explicitly prescribed, so that there's no room for one's personal characteristics to slip in. And to learn math one needs only the basic sorts of thought which are the endowment of every human. (Don't think of logarithms! Think about the way you decide when to get out of bed in the morning, or the way you reason about your friends' behavior. If you can do that, you can, in principle, do math.) It is a heartening fact that the book of nature is written in this universal language of curious children, which because it is pre-linguistic and pre-socialization is powerless to prevent any human being from learning it.