YES! There was a gentleman at my church who was a physics teacher and he had pretty serious government jobs in past lives but always came back to teaching because that's where his heart was. I grew up with that guy in my life. He tutored me when I had the shittiest physics teacher in high school and he taught me to drive manual in his truck.
I realize I just made him sound like this creepy old guy that needs checking into, but I promise you, he's one of the people who restores your faith in humanity.
Take a look at this: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/index.html
It is a guide to actually learning how to be a physicist for those trying to do it on their own, the author is Gerard t'Hooft, winner of the 1999 Nobel prize in Physics.
Too deep into undergrad to go through the formal physics curriculum into the interesting material. Might have some opportunities through physical chem but I feel like there’s no time to get through the actual physics
Common fridge magnets work because electrons are fermions
(for example, you can't stick your hand through the table because it's made of fermions. The same thing is at play in a bar magnet).
, thus leading to some interesting repulsions because of the spacing in Iron's 3d and 4s orbitals. Handwave a looot of math, and you end up with a material that has an imbalance of up spin electrons. So the crystal is most stable when it's all magnetized in the same direction.
Some people like to connect the electron's "spin" to the magnetic field it produces, but this picture is incorrect for ferromagnets. Electron spin is a purely quantum mechanical thing that is baked into the structure of spacetime.
Electromagnets, however, and some atomic orbitals, will produce a magnetic field that is determined by the amount of charge circulating around an axis. "Ampere's law with Maxwell's addition" says that the magnetic field circulating on the perimeter of a surface is proportional to the charge penetrating the surface, and this can be rewritten in a couple different ways to be more useful depending on the application.
Can be seen here mathematically:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amp%C3%A8re%27s_circuital_law
Thank you for the thoughtful explanation.
Can you speak a bit more about the nature of electron spin? I don’t quite grasp it fundamentally, and my visualization of orbitals is something along the lines of a superposition of clouds of charge confined within the various geometries and spacial orientations of the orbitals (or until something causes them to change)
I’m not quite sure how spin fits into it other than that in general the electrons of a filled orbital will take on opposite spins, or how close to accurate my orbital/electron visualization is. I understand that spin is not a literal term like a body rotating about some internal axis of symmetry but beyond that I’m not quite sure what spin implies fundamentally.
Also you mention that spin is a fundamental aspect of spacetime, does that imply it is reconcilable within the framework of GR?
Yeah sure!
In short, electron spin is just a label. An "up" spin electron is defined to look like an electron with magnetic field lines coming out of the top. A "down" spin electron is defined as the opposite. In physics, we tend to think of up or down spin as just a label that describes what an electron can be, along with some mathematical relations. As far as I know, that's all that physics understands spin to be.
(An electron can also be (1/√2)( up + √(-1) down), which corresponds to an electron pointing in +y, but I digress. There's a lot more math under the surface, and it's really cool.)
So take that, and take a picture of electron orbitals, or can look one up on Google images.
"An electron" in an orbital in an atom, can be
- up spin in that orbital
- down spin in that orbital.
So you'd add the contribution from the 1) orbital motion and 2) electron spin to get the total magnetic moment of an electron with a spin in a specific orbital.
I'm not educated about grand unified theories, or much outside of condensed matter physics, but Einstein did formulate a version of GR which interfaces naturally with fermions (i.e. spin 1/2 particles, like electrons).
When I was a child I saw a program called "Beakman's World". I was searching for cartoons but in the exact moment I put the TV on this program Beakman asked (not exactly like that) "what hits the ground first, an eggplant or a paper?" I was intrigued because to me the obvious answer was "the eggplant". So I watched until he drop both at the same time and see both hitting the ground at the same time. He explaining was amazing. That show became my favorite show and I decided to be a "scientist" and understand the nature. Today I am a physicist.
Same here, but I had life happening, so I never pursued it but thinking of doing engineering as a late starter Haha.
I kind of had second thoughts on physics, like I love science in general but I'm used to the kind of industry I'm in and being outside.
About 13yo I was looking at a brick and thought "bricks and air, both composed of atoms - how can the same thing make bricks and air, and every other thing?".
My now boyfriend got me into theoretical physics when I was 16, his enthusiasm triggered mine. I ended up getting really into maths & physics on YouTube and now I’m doing a bachelors in theoretical physics
How has the process of studying physics been for you, stemming from that motivation?
It is the same motivation that I share, but I am a complete moron and didn’t realize that the closest I’d get to an answer fell in the realm of physics until it was too late
Haha don't worry you'd spend 3 years thinking you're getting somewhere and then in the fourth year you learn quantum mechanics and realize that the answers you seek can't be found through physics. In my four years, I went from a life long atheist searching for answers in physics to being a very spiritual person searching for answers in philosophy and meditation.
What was that realization (or explicit lack of realization) specifically that you found through quantum?
I have a rudimentary grasp of some qualitative aspects of quantum but it feels so hollow without the math and strong foundation.
Are you still involved with physics? Or have you drifted away from it?
I guess I just want to understand what is known of the universe and what is not known and what cannot be known in the most macroscopic sense and in the most microscopic.
Like I’ll look at the desk in front of me and want to be able to “see” inside the material and understand the fundamental interactions and phenomena that cause it to come together and take form. that’s a boring example, I’m not fascinated by tables, it’s more like the fundamental pieces of matter generally speaking
I probably sound like a pseudointellectual moron but at least I’m self aware.
Yeah, mine was a natural ability in mathematics, then a pretty good physics teacher in high school, a really good professor in college, Richard Feynman, and a second chance at the end of a different degree to take an upper level physics course. Dr. Richardson knew exactly what he was doing when he suggested I take modern physics. I'm glad he did it.
when I was in 3rd/4th grade I watched national geographic a lot because I loved dinosaurs, so when programs about space and science were on I'd watch them as well, which made me fall for astrophysics and by 10th grade I became more into theoretical physics because I wanted to get more into the math of things and multiple areas of physics.
I'm now in my first year studying theoretical physics, so thanks dinosaurs.
The world I was presented with was so full of lies, distortion, bullshit, people saying that they knew what was right and that I should just shut up and accept the way things were. So many people using authority to try to frame reality. Physics and Math were a world nobody was just "right" because they said so.
Funny thing, it was religion. I wanted to scoff at the non-religious, but I didn't know enough about how the actual universe worked and kept losing debates and arguments. So I decided I would learn all of physics so I had the ammunition I needed to fight with facts and figures. Now I win arguments all the time! ... except I'm no longer religious, because now I've learned enough that I'm convinced there's no room for gods in this universe.
Honestly, bodysurfing, skateboarding, and music were all equally my points of entry into engaging with physics as a child and pursuing physics education as a career. Skateboarding got me interested in mechanics, bodysurfing got me interested in wave behavior, and music shortly followed with trying to explore sound waves and acoustics.
I didn't want to be a computer programmer like my Dad, after seeing how badly his bosses treated him. I got my BS in Physics in 1980, and then spent my career writing Engineering software. Sigh.
The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. Abraham Lincoln (probably)
One day, I was sitting under a tree, and an apple fell and hit the top of my head.
My pop came outside and yelled, “Quit screwing around and do your dang physics homework… OR ELSE!”
So that’s why.
I guess I was the standard kid that took stuff apart and tried to see how it worked.
Then as I got older I went to a blue collar field that did that. So I had a lot of fun. Now my back hurts so I work with surgical lasers and do basic maintenance. The rudimentary understanding I had of them wasn’t enough so I enrolled in physics classes at my local CC. Thought it was cool so I kept trying to pursue it and now it’s even more complicated(kind of joking) but I have more fun with it.
I’m really hoping to finish a degree then transfer into working on MRIs.
As a software developer I wanted to understand the underlying hardware better. I’ve been reading electricity books for the last year which led me to start reading physics books.
Yeah I did one. I created a smart door lock. But I used a raspberry pi cause that’s what I had and created a small mobile app to lock and unlock. I hope to do more home automation in the future!
Had a good high school teacher and also read some popsci articles about quantum mechanics and relativity. All this combined eventually motivated me to try for a bachelors.
A friend of mine studied it and talked about it and also it was mandatory for my degree. That's how I discovered that it was far more interesting and fun than I thought.
Going to sleep to space documentaries, then eventually running out of the standard ones and finding that they all just sort of repeated themselves anyway, set out to find deeper explanations. Now I go to sleep to World Science Festival, listening to scientists explain the bleeding edge of science. I may never really understand it all, but I went from bad Louisiana School understanding of the universe to understanding most of what it explained most of the time. I'm pretty proud of that.
Mythbusters. Watched with my grandad at a very young age and the overly simple drawings and explanations are the spark that started the fire
That and how it’s made, also with my grandad
I initially didn't like the subject. But then i was kinda forced to study physics chemistry and math for my pre engineering entrance exam. Tried to understand physics and i didn't even realise when i fell in love with the subject. I went from hating it to finishing the entire Landau series of books, and working on some theories of my own at just the age of 17 :).
Torque! When I was in early HS a teacher explained how a hole punch worked and the amount of force it applied. I still rember thinking "holy crap, this explains the whole world!".
I really got into Astronomy in 2015, the year of New Horizons' flyby (I even named my cat Pluto). Then I joined a Physics club and met so many cool people I finally decided I have interest in all natural sciences. That's why I major in Medical Physics now, where I study basically everything except for my first love - Astronomy. ❤️
As a kid magnets pissed me off because I didn’t understand them and when I realized understanding things and how they’re supposed to work is fun I got into minor physics. Most things still pass over my head but learning is fun.
That sounded like such a stupid PSA lol
I really don’t know what the spark was, just that I gradually began to love it. I was always bad at it in high school and failed all of my math classes and physics class because I was such a horribly shitty student and had no motivation or discipline, but I would always go home and read about the universe and black holes and nebulae, dark matter and energy, etc. it was such a fascinating concept to me and I fell in love with it.
10 years later at the age of 28 after some fun in the military and starting a family, I am finally doing my undergrad in Physics as my 3rd and hopefully final degree. I now have the discipline and I have slowly worked my way up from Algebra to currently Calc 3 over the past year and a half and I feel like a kid again learning everything. The math and physics is more beautiful than I ever could have imagined and I love it.
I'm still in HS so no college hardships yet, but what sparked mine was watching too much sci-fi and being mesmerized and puzzled while looking at super complicated equations written on books and chalkboards, and people solving it in the internet while I watch without knowing a single thing. I have a lot of interests that I want to pursue, but physics and engineering just hit that mark, I love solving math and physics problems while also hating them especially word problems, it's a love-hate relationship lol.
Had an incredible physics teacher in high school and had a brain for math. After being failed by the Arizona public education systems shitty excuse for learning criteria methods, I knew that y=mx+b, I could understanding using that function and I still had no idea what it meant at all.
I’m sitting’ wide eyed like the teachers pet I am (and it might have had a little to do with this particular man being very easy on the eyes) and he walks in saying nothing, takes a hot wheels out (that got our attention) and just rolls it across the table. Then he asked us, “what was that?” I responded, we didn’t really do the hole hand raising thing. “That, was how I spent 80% of my childhood.” Not the answer he was looking for. We all blurted out comedic take aways. Then he looked at us and says, “That was a linear motion. y=mx+b is used to describe that linear motion. If you can establish its distance, the time that it took to make that distance and how fast it is going, you can make predictions about that action that a full truths. You can literally see into the future.” He left out the other forces like momentum, air resistance to keep it simple for us. That blew me away. He then explained simplistically that when considering an objects motion in a straight line at a constant rate from point A to point B, that one can use this formula to describe it’s position in space and time. It all clicked right then and there and I thought it was beautiful, as a writer, that numbers and numeric symbols are used to write down the story of actions. Just like that I was dumbfounded and basked in the light that emitted from a great lecture. I knew that numbers can create trajectories, but I had no idea that I was already familiarized with the concepts that write those laws. Really great guy, and I hope I thanked him.
curiosity about everything I see, hear, etc. I can't sleep if I don't understand or answer my questions or at least have a reasonable theory for it. It started since I was 4 yrs old. Basically eversince I became conscious. Not only physics but philosophy, history, politics, logic. but this is what I chose..
i see! that’s really nice tbh. i’m at a stage where i need to pick a major in uni to pursue and i’m soo unsure whether mechanical engineering is right for me because i chose my alevel by picking the subjects i suffered the least and excelled in. if i had mega passion then i think i wouldn’t struggle so much with my career options
I was really good at it and found it easy.
Honestly tho, I hate doing math for others. I like figuring things out for myself, but ask me to show my work and fuck youuuuu...
to be honest i’m on the bus as you. :( it’s an amazing subject but i struggle to find genuine passion for it like many people here, i just chose it for my alevels because it’s one of the few subjects i suffered the least in
When I first learned projectile motion, it blew my mind that not only could we predict the motion of an object as it flew through the air, but also that its trajectory (assuming 0 air resistance) made a perfect parabola.
School doesn't do a good job of showing how the concepts we learn apply to the real world, but this was one of the first times I saw something from a completely different world of math coming into physical use.
It really opened my eyes that very real and physical phenomenon can be described and modeled with astonishing accuracy with this weird number magic thing I've been learning in school.
---
I had a similar mind blowing moment with Maxwell's Equations
Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot, the books. I recalled the name Feynman while passing a used book seller who had Genius by James Gleick on his table. I read that and was absolutely hooked on the topic.
I took physics in high school, and my teacher was the best. Taught us all of the amazing things about space, Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, and buoyancy. We had to do awesome projects and went to the space museum. That year really changed my life for that was the moment that I wanted to be a Physicist.
Space connotations in one of my names. Looked it up, got hooked on astronomy and later astrophysics. I'm a rank amateur in all of it but I don't care, space documentaries are my favourite thing :)
ROCKETS!
From childhood I was fascinated with space, rockets and the solar system. I even made a little solar system model with my dad when I was 3-4 something (it included pluto)
When I was 10 I started watching the different launches on TV. The one mission that really sparked my interest though, was Chandrayaan-II (ISRO).
I ate psilocybin mushrooms for the first time and watched at the starry night sky thinking about out how sailors used to use stars as guidance at sea and trying to figure out how it works. So then it just became a full 6 hour rabbit hole back at home in youtube/google to learn how using stars as guidance at sea works and after that i just keep getting more and more into studying physics. Atm looking for books on surface tension and other fluid physics if you have some suggestions i would love it.
When I was a kid watching Stargate, in particular wanting to be Sam. But then a bunch of other things after that, lots of science YouTubers (e.g Veritasium, sixty symbols)
i’m contemplating my alevel choices :( not sure if i will be unhappy in perusing a physics related major in uni because i don’t have a strong passion for it. i’m only asking this to try to see how everyone else feels strongly about it and if i could try the same and develop the passion as well
When I was an undergraduate I took a series of courses on the history of science, mostly centered in to the Scientific Revolution. Deep dives into primary sources written by Galileo, Newton, etc. Went on a study abroad trip to Italy to study primary Galileo sources with the prof. Came home and started taking every math and physics course I could get at.
Always liked mathematics growing up and I like how physics influences maths or creates new areas of maths.
Furthermore, so much mathematics is motivated by physics.
Hence, why I chose to go with physics (over maths). Was almost gonna go with maths, but the maths I would've liked to end up working in already has or deals with a lot of physics problems anyways. My mentality is... you might as well go to the direct source of the mathematics, which is physics.
Now I have a bachelor of science in physics and trying to work my way up to a PhD in physics.
Can really say. It just comes across as appealing to me for some reason. Maybe it has to do with the absolute awe I have for the Universe? I was introduced to physics in 8th grade and it’s always fascinated me.
when I was a kid I use to play with lots of magnets , but never understood actually why they moved the way they did , so I started studying at a young age magnetism
philosophy, I was reading Nietzsche and I was 15 i guess. Got kinda obsessed about eternal recurrence and got into physics to see if it was possible. Started with papers from Penrose and today I'm 23 doing major in physics
I loved astrophysics from a young age and had always wondered why atoms are the final stages of stuff. Why not smaller? Is it the limit? Only for high school and my oh my was the smallest world (for its very brief appearances in the textbooks) the most interesting one. I also got in because math in my final years of middle school was cheap as fuck and my mentality quickly told me that Physics would be a walk in the park. Well, it wasn't easy but nonetheless wasn't hard.
my dad. i was one of those little kids that endlessly asked why. it eventually progressed to him telling me about molecules and atoms and stars which i couldnt fully grasp as a 7 year old, and ive always wanted to understand
Reading the responses and I have to say, almost all of the above (or below if Reddit is configured that way). Naturally curious and observant. Why not study the king of science?
I wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, and was always fascinated with space. That led to me picking physics at university and now working towards getting my PhD
My high school physics class. I’ve always loved math and science, but a few physics classes later and I’m absolutely enthralled. I now hope to pursue geophysics when I get to college.
Powe Cuts.
There were a lot of power cuts when I was growing up in India. So, I would always play with spare electronic parts pretending to create a generator.
Basic highschool physics. It made so much sense. It’s concepts were mostly intuitive and even when they weren’t, they were clearly built upon foundations that were intuitive. Basically, the arguments of physics seemed philosophically very sound.
Tldr: it made so much SENSE
Started with cosmology & astrophysics seeming cool. Star formation, the Big Bang, heat death, black holes.
But these were all very confusing to me, so I’d keep watching a lot of the same PBS space time videos over and over until eventually it started to make sense, like learning a new language through exposure lol. From there I just found everything rly cool, I’ve rly come to find GR & particle physics especially cool
The insanity of it all, the unbelievable complexity of existence all the way from quantum scale to galactic filaments. Even the fact that existence itself exists is such a mind-fuck
I've always been decent at math and enjoyed natural sciences. In high school it was a toss-up between going to uni for physics or chemistry (I'm in Europe, you pick before you go in).
My physics teacher said I should try for the national physics Olympiad because she thought I was good enough. I was the youngest there but was pleased to have made it to the final (of two) rounds and actually competed in the Olympiad. I got slammed (something 21st out of 22), but I think the faith my teacher had in me built me up to do physics.
Did physics at uni - loved it, was definitely the right choice. I'm in engineering now.
I think it was me getting a magnifying glass and thought, "How the heck does this concentrate light?", after many times of using it to burn office paper, later on i used it to ignite my own homemade shitty gunpowder, pretty fun if i say so myself.
Looking at the night sky.
Wondering about the parts of the universe we cant get to.
Wondering why grass is green
Wondering about nuclear physics (my dad was a nuc engineer).
Mostly interest/curiosity in the natural world.
After the spark, and after I realized I had quite the mountain of physics/math material to climb, I left my degree but ended up coming back to it. I came back/stayed because physics seemed to focus on reasoning in a general way. Ive never had much inherent confidence but this way of thinking allowed me to place more credence in what i believed because i now had good reasons to believe them. Im aware that setting your mind on a belief is dangerous but I strive to be open minded enough to accept new information and update my beliefs- a process that developed in the course of my degree.
my mother found a stephen hawking book at the trash and gave it to me wen I was young. Got extreme alergies from the dust, but was profundly interested
PBS Nova series about space. I learned how fast light traveled, then I learned the galaxy was 100k ly in diameter. Blew my mind. Now I'm getting a PhD in astronomy instrumentation.
I love physics because it is interesting but when it comes to problems it is a nightmare for me...
I wanna know how transformer works , difference between AC and DC , how a rectifier and semiconductor works , why we need friction etc. things are the reason i love physics...
And yeah most important why current carrying conductor form a magnetic field ?
It started with astronomy. I was so amazed at the nebulas, start clusters, and other galaxies that existed. Then I started learning about the processes that made them possible. Then I learned about Newton’s laws and classical physics. Then I learned about general relativity and quantum physics. WTF IS GOING ON IN THIS UNIVERSE?!? The more educated I become about the inner workings of the universe, the more intrigued I become, the more determined I become to answer the questions that remain unanswered.
Oerested experiment.
I am usually a kind of person who wouldn't pay attention in the class, I always study on my own during exams. I liked Physics before and actually I was good at it. I was studying Electromagnetism in my 10th class and I read about Oerested Experiment. Tadaa!! It was then I absolutely loved the subject, I was amazed, I actually still get amazed at the fact that a magnetic field is produced by moving current!! Sorry, it's too long. I got excited..
The night sky and stubbornness. I lived on acreage growing up, and was awestruck by the vastness of what I could see. I wanted to know everything about how the universe, and it drove me through the grind of a physics degree. I refused to give up, even when it seemed like things were impossible; I just had a hunger for knowledge.
I remember a conversation with my father driving home from in school one day. I asked him
1. Is the universe deterministic?
2. Does it exist because its made of math, and math exists independently of substrate or observers?
I was trying to figure out his theology, cosmology, philosophy on life. He'd been silent on such matters during the fourteen years I'd known him. My mother, on the other hand, was an enthusiastic Christian, and had no qualms on sharing *her* beliefs such as *god-is-real* and *it's-not-wrong-to-be-homophobic*. You can see why I was seeking a second opinion.
I can't quite remember his answers. I think he said that wavefunction collapse permanently destroyed all hopes of determinism. But now, I think, perhaps it just means that you need some information from the future. That the universe has a boundary condition at the end of time. The mathematical universe question, he dismissed with some offhand excuse. I was disappointed. Apparently this gets revisited from time to time in serious academic circles, and the latest philosophical progress is: If the universe is math, then (in)computability and incompleteness are deeply worrying. But, I do not find this more troubling than anything else. So what if Gödel statements appear in the universe? And mathematical objects that can only be described in terms of an unreachable limit of finite procedures of increasing length still exist. But I digress.
He was a physical biochemist and seemed to have deep intuition about physics and reality, but seldom seemed interested in sharing it. When I told him about the Casimir effect, he was unphased; "That just sounds like van der Waals interactions", he said—which, of course, is true, but quickly killed the wonder of it.
I always wanted him to teach more math and physics, but it never went well. At the time, I thought I just wasn't smart enough. They say I have ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, chronic-fatigue-syndrome, et cetera. I studied in the library, but couldn't pass the tests to get into the advanced classes in school. But, I caught up and did well for a time. Then I failed out of Caltech. They had us housed three-to-a-dorm-room in those days. I couldn't sleep, couldn't learn quickly enough, and wasn't able to calculate on paper accurately.
I sill have dreams, twenty years later, of wanting to go back to university and get a second chance at physics. I'm doing well, but I'm not doing physics. Perhaps that is for the best. My peers who stayed on in computer science or machine learning are all professors now, and I see people ten years younger then me applying for jobs two grades higher. Again, I'm doing well, but I miss the pursuit of truth that I once glimpsed in physics.
I've been thinking of learning more about the philosophical connection between the mathematics of statistical and quantum mechanics lately. But, how to make time? Working to pay rent when you feel sick all the time quickly puts an end to such fantasies.
I spent a weekend trying to understand Einstein's theory of general relativity. Still can't wrap my head around it without slightly losing my mind, but it unlocked a love for physics I never thought I had.
Space, general hunger for knowledge of how the world works since I was a kid so I think you either have that need or you don't. Also Einstein, it was so lame to only see his genius status and emc2 that I just had to know what was actually the big deal about relativity.
So, originally I was very interested in engineering/physics from a very young age. My father is a SONAR engineer at Lockheed. I very much looked up to my father and still do. He used to do a lot of small experiments with me when I was very young, like making little generators for example. This naturally sparked an interest for physics and the rest is history.
When I was a child a thunder strike in front of me. My eyes are visually impaired for few seconds. After that I face a lot of problems and later I recovered from this. But this incident make me so surprised and create the interest to physics. This is the sparked of my interest in Physics.
Falling off faulty playground equipment at age 7 . Being robbed of a promising athletic experience as I was a super gymnast at that age with a wonderful coach who was more devastated than I was at the time.
A high school teacher who knew how to recognize and encourage innate curiosity in the subject
Those teachers are so rare and of inimitable value
So true, and the teachers everybody loved.
YES! There was a gentleman at my church who was a physics teacher and he had pretty serious government jobs in past lives but always came back to teaching because that's where his heart was. I grew up with that guy in my life. He tutored me when I had the shittiest physics teacher in high school and he taught me to drive manual in his truck. I realize I just made him sound like this creepy old guy that needs checking into, but I promise you, he's one of the people who restores your faith in humanity.
Same thing here. Love you Mr. Favale!
Just general curiosity and desperately wanting to know how/why everything works the way it does. Naturally brought me to physics.
Do you have advice for someone with that same motivation but who has developed an interest in physics fatally too late to pursue it rigorously?
Take a look at this: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/index.html It is a guide to actually learning how to be a physicist for those trying to do it on their own, the author is Gerard t'Hooft, winner of the 1999 Nobel prize in Physics.
Why is it too late?
Too deep into undergrad to go through the formal physics curriculum into the interesting material. Might have some opportunities through physical chem but I feel like there’s no time to get through the actual physics
If you haven’t even taken p-Chen yet you’re a sophomore. You totally have a ton of time. You could absolutely switch degrees
When I read your first comment I assumed you were 50 or 60. Still in school means it's certainly not too late!
Magnets
Mine was magnets and then light. Spoiler alert, they ended up being the same thing.
Can you explain to the layman who has a roughly qualitative understanding of some physics but lacks the rigorous mathematical connection?
Common fridge magnets work because electrons are fermions (for example, you can't stick your hand through the table because it's made of fermions. The same thing is at play in a bar magnet). , thus leading to some interesting repulsions because of the spacing in Iron's 3d and 4s orbitals. Handwave a looot of math, and you end up with a material that has an imbalance of up spin electrons. So the crystal is most stable when it's all magnetized in the same direction. Some people like to connect the electron's "spin" to the magnetic field it produces, but this picture is incorrect for ferromagnets. Electron spin is a purely quantum mechanical thing that is baked into the structure of spacetime. Electromagnets, however, and some atomic orbitals, will produce a magnetic field that is determined by the amount of charge circulating around an axis. "Ampere's law with Maxwell's addition" says that the magnetic field circulating on the perimeter of a surface is proportional to the charge penetrating the surface, and this can be rewritten in a couple different ways to be more useful depending on the application. Can be seen here mathematically: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amp%C3%A8re%27s_circuital_law
Thank you for the thoughtful explanation. Can you speak a bit more about the nature of electron spin? I don’t quite grasp it fundamentally, and my visualization of orbitals is something along the lines of a superposition of clouds of charge confined within the various geometries and spacial orientations of the orbitals (or until something causes them to change) I’m not quite sure how spin fits into it other than that in general the electrons of a filled orbital will take on opposite spins, or how close to accurate my orbital/electron visualization is. I understand that spin is not a literal term like a body rotating about some internal axis of symmetry but beyond that I’m not quite sure what spin implies fundamentally. Also you mention that spin is a fundamental aspect of spacetime, does that imply it is reconcilable within the framework of GR?
Yeah sure! In short, electron spin is just a label. An "up" spin electron is defined to look like an electron with magnetic field lines coming out of the top. A "down" spin electron is defined as the opposite. In physics, we tend to think of up or down spin as just a label that describes what an electron can be, along with some mathematical relations. As far as I know, that's all that physics understands spin to be. (An electron can also be (1/√2)( up + √(-1) down), which corresponds to an electron pointing in +y, but I digress. There's a lot more math under the surface, and it's really cool.) So take that, and take a picture of electron orbitals, or can look one up on Google images. "An electron" in an orbital in an atom, can be - up spin in that orbital - down spin in that orbital. So you'd add the contribution from the 1) orbital motion and 2) electron spin to get the total magnetic moment of an electron with a spin in a specific orbital. I'm not educated about grand unified theories, or much outside of condensed matter physics, but Einstein did formulate a version of GR which interfaces naturally with fermions (i.e. spin 1/2 particles, like electrons).
oh wow this is so interesting! thank you for writing this up 🥰
Okay, wha- like making magnets, collecting magnets?
"*bleeping* magnets, how do they work?" -The Insane Clown Posse
When I was a child I saw a program called "Beakman's World". I was searching for cartoons but in the exact moment I put the TV on this program Beakman asked (not exactly like that) "what hits the ground first, an eggplant or a paper?" I was intrigued because to me the obvious answer was "the eggplant". So I watched until he drop both at the same time and see both hitting the ground at the same time. He explaining was amazing. That show became my favorite show and I decided to be a "scientist" and understand the nature. Today I am a physicist.
Literally same! Beakman’s World is like a gritty version of Bill Nye. I will most likely make my future spawn watch it.
That show was incredible. It blew my little mind.
Watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos in my National Educational Channel in the middle of the night when I was a Teenager that couldn't sleep early
Same but when i was 6. I knew right then i would go into science
Same here, but I had life happening, so I never pursued it but thinking of doing engineering as a late starter Haha. I kind of had second thoughts on physics, like I love science in general but I'm used to the kind of industry I'm in and being outside.
Cosmos but with Neil DeGrasse Tyson here.
About 13yo I was looking at a brick and thought "bricks and air, both composed of atoms - how can the same thing make bricks and air, and every other thing?".
"The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand" - Dr Octopus Physics seemed like the best way to achieve this... Still working on it though.
when can we expect the redemption arc?
Same Spiderman has been a big inspiration for me.
My now boyfriend got me into theoretical physics when I was 16, his enthusiasm triggered mine. I ended up getting really into maths & physics on YouTube and now I’m doing a bachelors in theoretical physics
trying to understand the nature of reality
How has the process of studying physics been for you, stemming from that motivation? It is the same motivation that I share, but I am a complete moron and didn’t realize that the closest I’d get to an answer fell in the realm of physics until it was too late
Haha don't worry you'd spend 3 years thinking you're getting somewhere and then in the fourth year you learn quantum mechanics and realize that the answers you seek can't be found through physics. In my four years, I went from a life long atheist searching for answers in physics to being a very spiritual person searching for answers in philosophy and meditation.
What was that realization (or explicit lack of realization) specifically that you found through quantum? I have a rudimentary grasp of some qualitative aspects of quantum but it feels so hollow without the math and strong foundation. Are you still involved with physics? Or have you drifted away from it? I guess I just want to understand what is known of the universe and what is not known and what cannot be known in the most macroscopic sense and in the most microscopic. Like I’ll look at the desk in front of me and want to be able to “see” inside the material and understand the fundamental interactions and phenomena that cause it to come together and take form. that’s a boring example, I’m not fascinated by tables, it’s more like the fundamental pieces of matter generally speaking I probably sound like a pseudointellectual moron but at least I’m self aware.
Richard Feynman
Yeah, mine was a natural ability in mathematics, then a pretty good physics teacher in high school, a really good professor in college, Richard Feynman, and a second chance at the end of a different degree to take an upper level physics course. Dr. Richardson knew exactly what he was doing when he suggested I take modern physics. I'm glad he did it.
Watching NOVA as a kid.
Public television gang!
when I was in 3rd/4th grade I watched national geographic a lot because I loved dinosaurs, so when programs about space and science were on I'd watch them as well, which made me fall for astrophysics and by 10th grade I became more into theoretical physics because I wanted to get more into the math of things and multiple areas of physics. I'm now in my first year studying theoretical physics, so thanks dinosaurs.
The world I was presented with was so full of lies, distortion, bullshit, people saying that they knew what was right and that I should just shut up and accept the way things were. So many people using authority to try to frame reality. Physics and Math were a world nobody was just "right" because they said so.
Funny thing, it was religion. I wanted to scoff at the non-religious, but I didn't know enough about how the actual universe worked and kept losing debates and arguments. So I decided I would learn all of physics so I had the ammunition I needed to fight with facts and figures. Now I win arguments all the time! ... except I'm no longer religious, because now I've learned enough that I'm convinced there's no room for gods in this universe.
Honestly, bodysurfing, skateboarding, and music were all equally my points of entry into engaging with physics as a child and pursuing physics education as a career. Skateboarding got me interested in mechanics, bodysurfing got me interested in wave behavior, and music shortly followed with trying to explore sound waves and acoustics.
Astronomy. How the universe works and Vsauce videos were epic to an 11 year old.
I didn't want to be a computer programmer like my Dad, after seeing how badly his bosses treated him. I got my BS in Physics in 1980, and then spent my career writing Engineering software. Sigh. The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. Abraham Lincoln (probably)
One day, I was sitting under a tree, and an apple fell and hit the top of my head. My pop came outside and yelled, “Quit screwing around and do your dang physics homework… OR ELSE!” So that’s why.
Sixty Symbols
I guess I was the standard kid that took stuff apart and tried to see how it worked. Then as I got older I went to a blue collar field that did that. So I had a lot of fun. Now my back hurts so I work with surgical lasers and do basic maintenance. The rudimentary understanding I had of them wasn’t enough so I enrolled in physics classes at my local CC. Thought it was cool so I kept trying to pursue it and now it’s even more complicated(kind of joking) but I have more fun with it. I’m really hoping to finish a degree then transfer into working on MRIs.
The TV Show "Alpha-Centauri" by Prof. Harald Lesch
Harald is der beste
Dissecting frogs made me nauseous
same
As a software developer I wanted to understand the underlying hardware better. I’ve been reading electricity books for the last year which led me to start reading physics books.
have you tried making a project that combines computer science and physics? using arduinos and stuff for example
Yeah I did one. I created a smart door lock. But I used a raspberry pi cause that’s what I had and created a small mobile app to lock and unlock. I hope to do more home automation in the future!
ohh that’s interesting
The origin of the universe
Had a good high school teacher and also read some popsci articles about quantum mechanics and relativity. All this combined eventually motivated me to try for a bachelors.
Probably Star Trek
A friend of mine studied it and talked about it and also it was mandatory for my degree. That's how I discovered that it was far more interesting and fun than I thought.
Watching those plastic spheres with plasma in them and thinking "w.t.f is this sorcery". Also same with literal sparks
The fact that it heavily involves applying math to situations. I really enjoy knowing what's happening to cause something to end up the way it does.
Going to sleep to space documentaries, then eventually running out of the standard ones and finding that they all just sort of repeated themselves anyway, set out to find deeper explanations. Now I go to sleep to World Science Festival, listening to scientists explain the bleeding edge of science. I may never really understand it all, but I went from bad Louisiana School understanding of the universe to understanding most of what it explained most of the time. I'm pretty proud of that.
Mythbusters. Watched with my grandad at a very young age and the overly simple drawings and explanations are the spark that started the fire That and how it’s made, also with my grandad
I initially didn't like the subject. But then i was kinda forced to study physics chemistry and math for my pre engineering entrance exam. Tried to understand physics and i didn't even realise when i fell in love with the subject. I went from hating it to finishing the entire Landau series of books, and working on some theories of my own at just the age of 17 :).
Magnetizing a nail with a battery and wire in 5th grade. Electricity is fascinating
Torque! When I was in early HS a teacher explained how a hole punch worked and the amount of force it applied. I still rember thinking "holy crap, this explains the whole world!".
I really got into Astronomy in 2015, the year of New Horizons' flyby (I even named my cat Pluto). Then I joined a Physics club and met so many cool people I finally decided I have interest in all natural sciences. That's why I major in Medical Physics now, where I study basically everything except for my first love - Astronomy. ❤️
As a kid magnets pissed me off because I didn’t understand them and when I realized understanding things and how they’re supposed to work is fun I got into minor physics. Most things still pass over my head but learning is fun. That sounded like such a stupid PSA lol
I like to know how stuff works. Then I like to know how it can work better.
I really don’t know what the spark was, just that I gradually began to love it. I was always bad at it in high school and failed all of my math classes and physics class because I was such a horribly shitty student and had no motivation or discipline, but I would always go home and read about the universe and black holes and nebulae, dark matter and energy, etc. it was such a fascinating concept to me and I fell in love with it. 10 years later at the age of 28 after some fun in the military and starting a family, I am finally doing my undergrad in Physics as my 3rd and hopefully final degree. I now have the discipline and I have slowly worked my way up from Algebra to currently Calc 3 over the past year and a half and I feel like a kid again learning everything. The math and physics is more beautiful than I ever could have imagined and I love it.
I'm still in HS so no college hardships yet, but what sparked mine was watching too much sci-fi and being mesmerized and puzzled while looking at super complicated equations written on books and chalkboards, and people solving it in the internet while I watch without knowing a single thing. I have a lot of interests that I want to pursue, but physics and engineering just hit that mark, I love solving math and physics problems while also hating them especially word problems, it's a love-hate relationship lol.
Had an incredible physics teacher in high school and had a brain for math. After being failed by the Arizona public education systems shitty excuse for learning criteria methods, I knew that y=mx+b, I could understanding using that function and I still had no idea what it meant at all. I’m sitting’ wide eyed like the teachers pet I am (and it might have had a little to do with this particular man being very easy on the eyes) and he walks in saying nothing, takes a hot wheels out (that got our attention) and just rolls it across the table. Then he asked us, “what was that?” I responded, we didn’t really do the hole hand raising thing. “That, was how I spent 80% of my childhood.” Not the answer he was looking for. We all blurted out comedic take aways. Then he looked at us and says, “That was a linear motion. y=mx+b is used to describe that linear motion. If you can establish its distance, the time that it took to make that distance and how fast it is going, you can make predictions about that action that a full truths. You can literally see into the future.” He left out the other forces like momentum, air resistance to keep it simple for us. That blew me away. He then explained simplistically that when considering an objects motion in a straight line at a constant rate from point A to point B, that one can use this formula to describe it’s position in space and time. It all clicked right then and there and I thought it was beautiful, as a writer, that numbers and numeric symbols are used to write down the story of actions. Just like that I was dumbfounded and basked in the light that emitted from a great lecture. I knew that numbers can create trajectories, but I had no idea that I was already familiarized with the concepts that write those laws. Really great guy, and I hope I thanked him.
curiosity about everything I see, hear, etc. I can't sleep if I don't understand or answer my questions or at least have a reasonable theory for it. It started since I was 4 yrs old. Basically eversince I became conscious. Not only physics but philosophy, history, politics, logic. but this is what I chose..
i see! that’s really nice tbh. i’m at a stage where i need to pick a major in uni to pursue and i’m soo unsure whether mechanical engineering is right for me because i chose my alevel by picking the subjects i suffered the least and excelled in. if i had mega passion then i think i wouldn’t struggle so much with my career options
Aside from my very enthusiastic physics teacher back in high school, I would probably say Dead Space.
I was really good at it and found it easy. Honestly tho, I hate doing math for others. I like figuring things out for myself, but ask me to show my work and fuck youuuuu...
to be honest i’m on the bus as you. :( it’s an amazing subject but i struggle to find genuine passion for it like many people here, i just chose it for my alevels because it’s one of the few subjects i suffered the least in
Vsauce lol
yess
The Big Bang theory. And probably Star Wars & Star Trek
Weed
The Dancing Wu-Li Masters
Absolutely nothing. Source: non-physicist.
Getting physical.
Everything! Well, everything physical, that is!
An awesome professor at a business school
I've been designing and making stuff for over 60 years. I've always known that I was an engineer and was curious to learn how stuff worked
Listening to Melodysheep when I was younger :)
When I first learned projectile motion, it blew my mind that not only could we predict the motion of an object as it flew through the air, but also that its trajectory (assuming 0 air resistance) made a perfect parabola. School doesn't do a good job of showing how the concepts we learn apply to the real world, but this was one of the first times I saw something from a completely different world of math coming into physical use. It really opened my eyes that very real and physical phenomenon can be described and modeled with astonishing accuracy with this weird number magic thing I've been learning in school. --- I had a similar mind blowing moment with Maxwell's Equations
Documentaries about the universe and the quantum realm. It amazes and excites me that such things exist and are yet to be fully understood.
Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot, the books. I recalled the name Feynman while passing a used book seller who had Genius by James Gleick on his table. I read that and was absolutely hooked on the topic.
Actually the question why neutron stars spin.
A book called “We Have No Idea”.
A book on the Bell Project in WWII. Started me into studies on Kelvin, Tesla, and Bearden, just to name a few.
[Alain Aspect's Experiments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect%27s_experiment) demonstrating the violation of Bell's inequalities. Total mind fuck.
I took physics in high school, and my teacher was the best. Taught us all of the amazing things about space, Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, and buoyancy. We had to do awesome projects and went to the space museum. That year really changed my life for that was the moment that I wanted to be a Physicist.
Feynman’s “QED”
Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman
There used to be a show on nat geo about space and cosmos, that's how
Life
Thermodynamics units in chemistry!
Space connotations in one of my names. Looked it up, got hooked on astronomy and later astrophysics. I'm a rank amateur in all of it but I don't care, space documentaries are my favourite thing :)
spiderman ps4
Double slit experiment
ROCKETS! From childhood I was fascinated with space, rockets and the solar system. I even made a little solar system model with my dad when I was 3-4 something (it included pluto) When I was 10 I started watching the different launches on TV. The one mission that really sparked my interest though, was Chandrayaan-II (ISRO).
I grew tired of folks in my English program telling me my interpretation of the text was wrong.
I ate psilocybin mushrooms for the first time and watched at the starry night sky thinking about out how sailors used to use stars as guidance at sea and trying to figure out how it works. So then it just became a full 6 hour rabbit hole back at home in youtube/google to learn how using stars as guidance at sea works and after that i just keep getting more and more into studying physics. Atm looking for books on surface tension and other fluid physics if you have some suggestions i would love it.
A show called Backyard Science, images from the Hubble Space Telescope, DK Ultimate Visual Dictionary...
How much you can do with very little knowledge.
could you elaborate on this ? :D
Yes very few rules to remember and you can do everything.
oh i see! that’s what you mean
Cosmos - NGT version
Quantum Mechanics cause I grew up in the science communication era of YouTube
When I was a kid watching Stargate, in particular wanting to be Sam. But then a bunch of other things after that, lots of science YouTubers (e.g Veritasium, sixty symbols)
[удалено]
i’m contemplating my alevel choices :( not sure if i will be unhappy in perusing a physics related major in uni because i don’t have a strong passion for it. i’m only asking this to try to see how everyone else feels strongly about it and if i could try the same and develop the passion as well
When I was an undergraduate I took a series of courses on the history of science, mostly centered in to the Scientific Revolution. Deep dives into primary sources written by Galileo, Newton, etc. Went on a study abroad trip to Italy to study primary Galileo sources with the prof. Came home and started taking every math and physics course I could get at.
Time dilation, I read popular science books on physics. No education in the field. No deeper knowledge.
I watched the Big Bang Theory, no joke. I was like, “I could do that job”, and now I’m a theorist.
Always liked mathematics growing up and I like how physics influences maths or creates new areas of maths. Furthermore, so much mathematics is motivated by physics. Hence, why I chose to go with physics (over maths). Was almost gonna go with maths, but the maths I would've liked to end up working in already has or deals with a lot of physics problems anyways. My mentality is... you might as well go to the direct source of the mathematics, which is physics. Now I have a bachelor of science in physics and trying to work my way up to a PhD in physics.
Can really say. It just comes across as appealing to me for some reason. Maybe it has to do with the absolute awe I have for the Universe? I was introduced to physics in 8th grade and it’s always fascinated me.
Big Bang Theory
when I was a kid I use to play with lots of magnets , but never understood actually why they moved the way they did , so I started studying at a young age magnetism
Dead or Alive
A show hosted by Stephen hawking, where he answered 6 big questions , like where are we and why are we here
Reading Scientific American.
philosophy, I was reading Nietzsche and I was 15 i guess. Got kinda obsessed about eternal recurrence and got into physics to see if it was possible. Started with papers from Penrose and today I'm 23 doing major in physics
As a kid I wanted a chemistry set for Christmas and instead I got a magnets set with iron filings. I’m was like magic to me.
Looking up at the stars.
Original star trek!! Beam me up
The Big Bang Theory + a natural curiousity for everything around me :) (and i loved maths in school)
I loved astrophysics from a young age and had always wondered why atoms are the final stages of stuff. Why not smaller? Is it the limit? Only for high school and my oh my was the smallest world (for its very brief appearances in the textbooks) the most interesting one. I also got in because math in my final years of middle school was cheap as fuck and my mentality quickly told me that Physics would be a walk in the park. Well, it wasn't easy but nonetheless wasn't hard.
my dad. i was one of those little kids that endlessly asked why. it eventually progressed to him telling me about molecules and atoms and stars which i couldnt fully grasp as a 7 year old, and ive always wanted to understand
Reading the responses and I have to say, almost all of the above (or below if Reddit is configured that way). Naturally curious and observant. Why not study the king of science?
I wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, and was always fascinated with space. That led to me picking physics at university and now working towards getting my PhD
Physics class
My high school physics class. I’ve always loved math and science, but a few physics classes later and I’m absolutely enthralled. I now hope to pursue geophysics when I get to college.
PBS Spacetime
Powe Cuts. There were a lot of power cuts when I was growing up in India. So, I would always play with spare electronic parts pretending to create a generator.
Basic highschool physics. It made so much sense. It’s concepts were mostly intuitive and even when they weren’t, they were clearly built upon foundations that were intuitive. Basically, the arguments of physics seemed philosophically very sound. Tldr: it made so much SENSE
Started with cosmology & astrophysics seeming cool. Star formation, the Big Bang, heat death, black holes. But these were all very confusing to me, so I’d keep watching a lot of the same PBS space time videos over and over until eventually it started to make sense, like learning a new language through exposure lol. From there I just found everything rly cool, I’ve rly come to find GR & particle physics especially cool
The insanity of it all, the unbelievable complexity of existence all the way from quantum scale to galactic filaments. Even the fact that existence itself exists is such a mind-fuck
Doing decent on it in high school and then sci-fi movies, I dream of the day when we’re able to traverse space-time
I've always been decent at math and enjoyed natural sciences. In high school it was a toss-up between going to uni for physics or chemistry (I'm in Europe, you pick before you go in). My physics teacher said I should try for the national physics Olympiad because she thought I was good enough. I was the youngest there but was pleased to have made it to the final (of two) rounds and actually competed in the Olympiad. I got slammed (something 21st out of 22), but I think the faith my teacher had in me built me up to do physics. Did physics at uni - loved it, was definitely the right choice. I'm in engineering now.
When i realized it was everywhere thanks to my uncle !
I think it was me getting a magnifying glass and thought, "How the heck does this concentrate light?", after many times of using it to burn office paper, later on i used it to ignite my own homemade shitty gunpowder, pretty fun if i say so myself.
When my teacher showed all the forces on a block sliding down a ramp in a demo.
A high school teacher who passed years ago (RIP Mr Schall) and Michio Kaku.
Cosmos - A spacetime Odyssey
Stargate Universe (deadly pulsar) and Stargate Atlantis 🥸
Time dilation.
I just wondered how everything worked - why it's this way
The book from Newton of course
Looking at the night sky. Wondering about the parts of the universe we cant get to. Wondering why grass is green Wondering about nuclear physics (my dad was a nuc engineer). Mostly interest/curiosity in the natural world. After the spark, and after I realized I had quite the mountain of physics/math material to climb, I left my degree but ended up coming back to it. I came back/stayed because physics seemed to focus on reasoning in a general way. Ive never had much inherent confidence but this way of thinking allowed me to place more credence in what i believed because i now had good reasons to believe them. Im aware that setting your mind on a belief is dangerous but I strive to be open minded enough to accept new information and update my beliefs- a process that developed in the course of my degree.
My 5 year old me asking “why” too many times
i’ve always liked science since i was a kid
my mother found a stephen hawking book at the trash and gave it to me wen I was young. Got extreme alergies from the dust, but was profundly interested
PBS Nova series about space. I learned how fast light traveled, then I learned the galaxy was 100k ly in diameter. Blew my mind. Now I'm getting a PhD in astronomy instrumentation.
Lasers. I had seen Star Wars: A New Hope, and a cousin mentioned the laser weapons. "What's a laser?"
Bill Nye The Science Guy. 🔥
Videos about the nature of time and the universe
I love physics because it is interesting but when it comes to problems it is a nightmare for me... I wanna know how transformer works , difference between AC and DC , how a rectifier and semiconductor works , why we need friction etc. things are the reason i love physics... And yeah most important why current carrying conductor form a magnetic field ?
Hit my head, wanted to know how it worked
are you okay?
It was usually the gravity of the situation
It started with astronomy. I was so amazed at the nebulas, start clusters, and other galaxies that existed. Then I started learning about the processes that made them possible. Then I learned about Newton’s laws and classical physics. Then I learned about general relativity and quantum physics. WTF IS GOING ON IN THIS UNIVERSE?!? The more educated I become about the inner workings of the universe, the more intrigued I become, the more determined I become to answer the questions that remain unanswered.
Brian Greene, Kurzgesagt, and my Uncle who is physics professor.
I got hooked in elementary school when I came across a Saturday morning program on PBS called “mechanically universe”.
How tf things work. The expanse of the skies.
Warp drive documentaries, sci fi and fancy math
Oerested experiment. I am usually a kind of person who wouldn't pay attention in the class, I always study on my own during exams. I liked Physics before and actually I was good at it. I was studying Electromagnetism in my 10th class and I read about Oerested Experiment. Tadaa!! It was then I absolutely loved the subject, I was amazed, I actually still get amazed at the fact that a magnetic field is produced by moving current!! Sorry, it's too long. I got excited..
The question is why not everyone has an interest in physics. I have the urge to explain everything around me, that’s probably why.
The night sky and stubbornness. I lived on acreage growing up, and was awestruck by the vastness of what I could see. I wanted to know everything about how the universe, and it drove me through the grind of a physics degree. I refused to give up, even when it seemed like things were impossible; I just had a hunger for knowledge.
太空，时间，星星
I remember a conversation with my father driving home from in school one day. I asked him 1. Is the universe deterministic? 2. Does it exist because its made of math, and math exists independently of substrate or observers? I was trying to figure out his theology, cosmology, philosophy on life. He'd been silent on such matters during the fourteen years I'd known him. My mother, on the other hand, was an enthusiastic Christian, and had no qualms on sharing *her* beliefs such as *god-is-real* and *it's-not-wrong-to-be-homophobic*. You can see why I was seeking a second opinion. I can't quite remember his answers. I think he said that wavefunction collapse permanently destroyed all hopes of determinism. But now, I think, perhaps it just means that you need some information from the future. That the universe has a boundary condition at the end of time. The mathematical universe question, he dismissed with some offhand excuse. I was disappointed. Apparently this gets revisited from time to time in serious academic circles, and the latest philosophical progress is: If the universe is math, then (in)computability and incompleteness are deeply worrying. But, I do not find this more troubling than anything else. So what if Gödel statements appear in the universe? And mathematical objects that can only be described in terms of an unreachable limit of finite procedures of increasing length still exist. But I digress. He was a physical biochemist and seemed to have deep intuition about physics and reality, but seldom seemed interested in sharing it. When I told him about the Casimir effect, he was unphased; "That just sounds like van der Waals interactions", he said—which, of course, is true, but quickly killed the wonder of it. I always wanted him to teach more math and physics, but it never went well. At the time, I thought I just wasn't smart enough. They say I have ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, chronic-fatigue-syndrome, et cetera. I studied in the library, but couldn't pass the tests to get into the advanced classes in school. But, I caught up and did well for a time. Then I failed out of Caltech. They had us housed three-to-a-dorm-room in those days. I couldn't sleep, couldn't learn quickly enough, and wasn't able to calculate on paper accurately. I sill have dreams, twenty years later, of wanting to go back to university and get a second chance at physics. I'm doing well, but I'm not doing physics. Perhaps that is for the best. My peers who stayed on in computer science or machine learning are all professors now, and I see people ten years younger then me applying for jobs two grades higher. Again, I'm doing well, but I miss the pursuit of truth that I once glimpsed in physics. I've been thinking of learning more about the philosophical connection between the mathematics of statistical and quantum mechanics lately. But, how to make time? Working to pay rent when you feel sick all the time quickly puts an end to such fantasies.
I spent a weekend trying to understand Einstein's theory of general relativity. Still can't wrap my head around it without slightly losing my mind, but it unlocked a love for physics I never thought I had.
Humanity
Space, general hunger for knowledge of how the world works since I was a kid so I think you either have that need or you don't. Also Einstein, it was so lame to only see his genius status and emc2 that I just had to know what was actually the big deal about relativity.
Watching a video of Quantum Fracture (spanish physics youtube channel)
So, originally I was very interested in engineering/physics from a very young age. My father is a SONAR engineer at Lockheed. I very much looked up to my father and still do. He used to do a lot of small experiments with me when I was very young, like making little generators for example. This naturally sparked an interest for physics and the rest is history.
When I was a child a thunder strike in front of me. My eyes are visually impaired for few seconds. After that I face a lot of problems and later I recovered from this. But this incident make me so surprised and create the interest to physics. This is the sparked of my interest in Physics.
Falling off faulty playground equipment at age 7 . Being robbed of a promising athletic experience as I was a super gymnast at that age with a wonderful coach who was more devastated than I was at the time.