I’ve had the following conversation at least a few dozen times:
“So where do you work?”
Me: “I’m a professor over at the university.”
“What do you teach?”
“Physics.”
“Physics? Yikes! Physics is hard.”
Mathematics and chemistry folks that I know get similar responses. The unspoken assumption is, why would you want to study something so difficult?
Well, why wouldn’t you?
This leads me to my main point. When asked why I decided to study physics in the first place, my response is usually “Because physics is hard.” To me, that’s a sufficient reason. Not necessary, but sufficient. I can’t imagine having a job that wasn’t mentally challenging. Well, unless they paid me enough.
My first exposure to physics (not just science but physics) was in high school, 10th grade I think, when I read a copy of The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Today I know this book is full of new age nonsense, Deepak Chopra-esque mumbo jumbo, but of course I couldn’t know that at the time. All I could see at the age of 15 was this great bizarre world of quantum weirdness, and what’s more people were still investigating it. There was work to be done. Any copy of Bullfinch’s mythology, or any religious text for that matter, was full of similar bizarre weirdness, but those fields of study seemed static and dead. But quantum mechanics? You mean people get paid to think about this shit, and study it in a laboratory? Count me in!
I was lucky enough to recognize at the time that I didn’t yet have the toolkit for thinking about these kinds of things. Without a working understanding of calculus, without following the trajectory of physics history into the early 20th century, without seeing the careful, subtle arguments of the physics greats, one can’t really get a handle on quantum mechanics at all. I wish I had a dollar for every time I met someone who claimed to know “all about” quantum mechanics because they watched a Nova episode about Schrödinger’s cat. But sorry, quantum mechanics is primarily (arguably entirely) a mathematical theory and as such there are no shortcuts to understanding. Read as many Brian Greene books as you like…read my book, while you’re at it…but all that can really do is whet your appetite for more advanced study.
That’s what happened to me. I read a new age book filled with nonsense, but that had enough physics to get me interested. I wanted to learn more than the author; I wanted to be able to tell him where he was wrong. (I can certainly do this now.) And I stuck with physics because it’s maddeningly difficult.
Don’t be afraid of learning difficult things. Study physics. Take up quilting. Learn to play the violin. Learn how to fix a boat. Read a book about the Crimean war. Invent a recipe for Baked Alaska.
If it’s not difficult, then why are you bothering with it?
Many Worlds Theory 