/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11683123
just do it and see what happens retard

>>11683128
>Just waste your life trying to do shit you are potentially not suited for
Don't do this op

>>11683173
>waste your life
melodramatic zoomer retard, he's enrolling in college. if he gets filtered in his second year and has to switch to engineering instead it's barely an inconvenience, let alone a ruined life

>>11683123
>How can I assess my intelligence to decide whether I am smart enough
You gain (mathematical) maturity by taking harder and harder courses and become better.
>or if I should rather go for a engineering meme degree
It's easier to switch from engineering to physics then the other way around. First year courses are superset.

>Generic Engineer
>Fall 1
Calculus 1
Matrix Algebra
Physics 1
Gen Chem 1
English 1

>Generic Engineer
>Spring 1
Calculus 2
Matlab
Physics 2
Gen Chem 2
Engineering Statics

>Physics
>Fall 1
Calculus 1
Matrix Algebra
Physics 1
English 1
Elective

>Physics
>Spring 1
Calculus 2
Physics 2
Elective
Elective
Elective

>>11683128
This.
>>11683173
Yeah, don't even try to find out if you're suited and work in McDs for the rest of your life. You cant fail that you never try. :^)

>>11683238
>and work in McDs for the rest of your life.
You have to be absolutely retarded to become this with a physics master

Well I'm sure there are people that know game theory here.
According to game theory, should a non genius major in science?

>>11684409
>a non genius
Why would you call OP a non genius? He seems pretty smart to me.

>>11684434
I'm sure the OP is smart, most likely much smarter than me, but he's going under the assumption he wont be able to tackle the harder stuff.

>>11684444
>but he's going under the assumption he wont be able to tackle the harder stuff.
righty fair enough.
>most likely much smarter than me
Why would you think that? You seem to know game theory

>>11683233
But I'd never figure out if I could do physics this way. I know that I would be doing good in engineering, it's just that I would a less shallow sciencethat isn't just about producing stuff to make sweet monies.

>>11683123
Take a mathematical methods book like by Boas, then take a shot at Taylor Classical mechanics. If you get through Boas then you have the mathematical maturity to swim through the math and if you get through classical mechanics then you have the aptitude for physics at the bachelors level, if you don't like classical mechanics then most likely you are most suited towards pure math or engineering or even chemistry, good luck anon, I love you.

>>11684552
Thanks a ton anon, this is the kind of answer I was asking for. What are the prerequisites for those books? I am still in Highschool and may need to learn some things prior to reading this.

>>11683123
PhD in mathematical physics here.

What do you want to do in life? Looking back, undergrad courses really aren't that hard, although they seem it at the time. Parrot fashion learning will get you 90% of the way there. The BIG difference is that engineering, finance degrees are an actual qualification that is recongised by professional bodies that will still be useful for ~10 years at least. Physics, maths etc are utterly useless degrees unless you want to go on for a PhD. 'Oh but industry needs non-destructive testing blah blah' expt that so many people with 5+ years of research going for the same positions.

I wanted to study maths because I was obsessed by primes and infinity. I didn't care about a career, and was told if you study maths then you can always blah blah. After 10 years in research, my salary is ~$60k which is more than I've ever had as I grew up dirt poor, but may not be enough for a lot of people. My job is interesting, but I'm hardly working on the theory of everything or whatever. I mean I am, but for a hobby and my colleagues would laugh if they knew.

Looking back, I wish I had banked the academic stuff and gotten the professional qualifications first. I still could have gotten a PhD, especially in my area of fluid dynamics which realisitically is a crap ton harder than e.g. string theory anyway so more intellectually satisfying.

>>11684578

What is it about fluid dynamics that you find more challenging than string theory?

>>11684578
First of all, thank you very much.
>What do you want to do in life?
I am not sure yet. I would like to get a job that requires me to be creative and come up with new ideas on a regular basis, and I heard that physicists get hired in engineering jobs for this purpose: They don't know anything about engineering and thus come up with crazy ideas, which are often totally different from an engineers ideas. This can sometimes be useful when something very special needs to be done.
I am currently working on some programming projects in my free time as this is something to get into very easily but studying CS would turn me into a codemonkey, whereas I heard that physicists can get into data science later as they know about handling data from experimental physics. Sure, none of the jobs I would like to do are especially suited for a physics graduate but I would say I am good with people and would probably get a job somehow. I do not need to earn a shitton of money although I would definitely like to make a living off my job.

>>11684401
retard

>>11684673
No u retard

>>11683123
You made this thread so the answer is pretty obvious that you won't be able to do it.

>>11683123
The real question is if your brain is big enough for NOT studying physics

>>11683123
Have confidence in yourself anon. If you're the best in your class then you're almost certainly good enough for it. The concepts are very daunting at first, but that's what lectures and the university is for. You'll have peers and tutors and a network to help you

>>11684589
bro there’s like PDEs and stuff

>>11683128
Fpbp just do it pussy

>>11683173
That's call life you sheltered ladyboy. Sometimes you suffer traumatic failures and existential angst, then you bury it deep down inside and use it to fuel your next ventures.

>>11684578
>my area of fluid dynamics
i feel sorry for you

>>11685162
Are you serious? Considering something now means you're stupid for not knowing the answer already?
>>11685185
Why?
>>11685381
Thanks, I am happy about your confirmation

>>11685423
>Are you serious?
Yes.

>>11683123
Well if you were going to struggle with the abstract stuff, at least physics has less of it than pure maths.

>>11683123
Physics is almost art, its probably because they all have seen some crazy experiments which contradict everything in a classical textbook, hence they have no problem stating the most basic axioms which drive humans forward:
"I don't know why"

>>11683123
just study, bro, just fucking study its not that hard

>>11685585
>t. 150 iq mastermind

>>11685599
you really don't need more than 115 to get a bachelor's in physics these days

>>11685602
115 is even more than I expected but idk how much IQ matters for physics. I am a CS fag myself

>>11683173
That’s just how life works. You’re not omniscient and you can’t possibly know what you’re going to be good at to direct 100% of your life into that thing. You should be advising OP to be paying close attention and be perceptive so he can try new things but exit at the right time.

>>11685390

Yikes, fortunately we're on the cusp of the CFD revolution!

>>11683123

Literally just go into the subject if that's what you feel genuinely interested in. Your personal intrigue for the topic as well as your ability to network and work with others is going to dictate how well you perform in undergraduate physics. I double majored in physics and astronomy and just finished my Bachelor's a few weeks ago, and I had serious doubts at the beginning of my academic career I'd be able to do it because I "Wasn't one of the smart ones." I hit a lot of roadblocks along the way, had to change direction a few times, but ultimately I did it.

Early on (Like seriously most of Freshman/Sophomore year) my strategy of approaching the courses was stupidly misinformed and I was arrogant enough to think that the only way to do physics was to isolate yourself from other people and just go through the motions of solving problems, which isn't actually how you learn. Develop some friendships so you can work in groups (I can't stress enough how important this is), and don't be afraid to go to your professor for help. The hardest part of undergrad in physics for me was the first few semesters when all the exams were these dumbfuck bubble sheets and you sat in a lecture hall filled with ~200 other students. Terrible learning environment.

Undergraduate courses mostly got easier with time because, even if the material was more advanced, I had people I could turn to if I was confused besides the professor, and smaller class sizes meant more flexibility with deadlines and a more fulfilling in-class experience because it felt more like a conversation than a lecture.

>>11685874
Thanks for posting about your experience anon! What are you going to do now? Do a masters? Do you already know what kind of job you want to get?

>>11685655
Physics majors tend to have the highest average IQ Then philosophy, then chem, then bio.

>>11684444
wow, four fours. must feel good to get that get.

>>11685897

I'll get my master's degree in a few years but it's probably not gonna be in physics. I had started out in college wanting to go into education because I really enjoyed the idea of being able to teach physics or mathematics as someone who certainly struggled to find their footing in the subjects, and my experience in college continued to foster that idea. I tutored for my school's introductory astronomy courses and TA'd for Physics I and II for non-science majors and found I enjoyed it a lot more than I even thought I would, so I'm planning on going into teaching and likely getting my master's in education. Anything after a physics degree is a cake walk by comparison. Many people who graduate with physics degrees don't go to grad school, a good chunk just hop into industry jobs because the problem solving strategies and general skillsets developed in a physics curriculum are favorable to employers in a lot of different areas.

But who knows where things will take me? I just graduated two weeks ago, I don't know what opportunities might pop up in the future. Everything's very unusual right now because of Coronavirus. This makes searching for teaching jobs equally strange because I don't even know if public schools will reopen in time for the Fall.

>>11683233
is that srsly an Msc degree program? what do u learn from that series other than how to meet disparate deadlines with heavy workloads?

>>11683123
Do your undergrad in engineering physics. If you rock it, you go on to an actual physics masters/PhD.

If you don’t rock it, you are still “technically” an engineer and can salvage a paycheck out of your brainletism.

>>11683173
This
Better play videogames until until some strangers on a Canadian HRT board remotely confirm whether your brain is big enough for studying physics.

>>11685720
it's called an iq test, the most standardized intelligence test as of currently

>>11684569
For Boas the prerequisites is precalculus and for Taylor it's Calculus and differential equations, but you can learn all of that from Boas. The order goes like Boas then Taylor then Griffith's electrodynamics then quantum mechanics at townsend or Shankar then thermal physics by reif, after that well it's up to you what you'll specialize, who knows?

>>11687810
Thanks. I am German and looking up precalculus real quick ended in multiple curriculums of different lengths. Are matrix or integrals part of precalculus? If I just start the book, can I learn the stuff that I didn't know before alongside?

>>11683123
You don't need a high IQ for physics

>>11688020
>t. Humanities undergrad

>>11687887
>If I just start the book, can I learn the stuff that I didn't know before alongside?
I'd just try that. But it might be very slow reading this if you have to loom up stuff all the time

>>11686285
source?

>>11684552
>Boas
how long should it take me to read this book? I am not op but in a similar situation and I've never read a textbook before

>>11683173
A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.

>>11691095
You are neither talking to your 5 yo children nor to your Twitter followers here

>>11683123
if you can speak English you can learn math easy. try not to get bogged down in syllabus and try focus on getting your head around the core mathematical concepts. youtube does a tremendous job at it much better than the ancient book users throw at you to stroke their own intellectual egos only.

>>11691597
If I wanted to learn the concepts from pic related with videos, would I buy pic related and Google every topic discussed? Or how would you do this?

>>11691592
Yeah don't go for anything in life that requires perseverance because you fear failure so much. See where you end up.

>>11689409
>>Boas
>how long should it take me to read this book?
I said about a month but that depends on how much free time you have. It's a little less than 1000 pages if I recall correctly

>>11691603
Hyperbolic euclidean geometry i think that looks like. I started off on youtube with the map of mathematics and audiobooks on history maths as a species when we started off counting and egyptions discovering fractions to pythagoras trigonometry and euclidean geometry, then moved onto algebra as was the next breakthrough during the golden age of enlightement 15th century i thinnnk?
Algebra introduced letters and got into the core algorithms of what happens when you plug in numbers to them to calculate stuff. Also invented the zero probably.

Newton and leibnitz came along and ushered the rennaisance in the early 17th with pricipia mathematica, that stuff introduced a new way to descibe reality with his laws of motion, three rules he derived from his brand new form of calculus that dealt with the relationships between infinities and the infinitely small to find areas under a curve.
Round the same time You had gauss, james clarke maxwell and james watt, faraday working mathematical equations for electicity and elecromagnatism. V = IR etc.
Euler is probably the best mathematician ever known to produce the relationships of pi and irrational numbers in his famous equation.. i forgot it but its cool from what i remember.
Boolean algebra was also discovered/invented which ushered information theory, condensing information down to either a true or false statements including boolean algebra which counts in binary we use for computers.

Einstein bridged space and time into his equations for special relativity and solved the relationships between matter and spacetime with general relativity.
Also with dirac, heisenberg, shrodinger, feynman, rutherford, curie and a heap of other crazy cats then took einsteins nobel idea of the photoelectric effect do demonstrate that light is both a wave and a particle to give us the field of quantum mechanics and eventually the standad model of particles
This is only just the tip tho

>>11692653
ok but how did you answer the person you were replying to?

>>11683123
You'll figure it out when you get there. Things take effort. If you're not willing to put on effort whatever you do then you will not succeed at anything. If you thought physics and math were easy then it may take longer to require effort. Figure out what you want to do with the degree and go from there. Too many people end up switching because of where the road leads, not how steep the road is

>>11683233
>easier to switch from engineering to physics then the other way around
>no gen chem course in physics first year

Yikes! Looks like someone doesn't know what they're talking about!

>>11693393
>gen chem
What would this be needed for in any of those majors?

>>11693393
Most schools don't require it. It's regrettable but that's how it is.

>>11693911
>It's regrettable
Nope

>>11693139
personally its just a good plot go by when learning which maths to tackle and it really describes just the thought process of we were thinking when dealing with triangles or functions or whatever the process mathematics is trying to convey about our reality. and its very intriguing the most important is to find interest in it. for example, kings and bishops used to be the ruling class until the printing press and mass distribution of newtons mathematics, turns out the only people who read it were sailors since they had all the time in the world and used the knowledge to found investment and wall street stock market and became titans of industry, dwarfing most monarchys.

>>11693885
>studies particle, laser, and material physics
>doesn't know how atoms work

>>11694690
>for example, kings and bishops used to be the ruling class until the printing press and mass distribution of newtons mathematics, turns out the only people who read it were sailors since they had all the time in the world and used the knowledge to found investment and wall street stock market and became titans of industry, dwarfing most monarchys.
Didn't know that, pretty cool imo

>>11695534
yeah that's why I posted about it

>>11683123
Do a physics bachelor and a engineering master, this is how to land a 10/10 job

>>11695832
This but with data science or compsci. As a physicist you are highly suited for AI/ML or statistics

>>11695908
Based, this is basically the only job you can get with a fucking physics meme degree

>>11696040
Wrong, you can get any engineering job with a physics degree

>>11696298
Kek, I don't think you can get ANY job except McBurgers burger flipping with a physics degree

>>11683123
STOP GETTING OBSESSED OVER IQ FAGGOTS

>>11697437
What? I wasn't even talking about IQ. You can't deny that some are more suited for physics or maths and some aren't

>>11697437
>t. brainlet

>>11697516
Ok sorry then

>>11683123
Just try it OP. It is hard to tell before you actually know what kind of stuff you have to do. I personally switched from phy to eng because it was so hard that I hardly had an free time. I also wanted to enjoy college life

>>11683184
>college
Yeah, so wasting his life getting 100,000 dollars in debt for a piece of paper when he could just download books on libgen for free and get an even better education by studying at his own pace on his own terms.

>>11683233
>English

>>11684578
>I mean I am, but for a hobby and my colleagues would laugh if they knew.
Absolutely based, keep it up anon

>>11699341
ikr? He seems like a pretty cool dude, classic mathematician

>>11699332
Consider trying to get a job with a high school degree and "but I taught myself from free pdfs just trust me"

>>11700164
>Consider trying to get a job with a high school degree
where's the fucking problem

>>11683123
Study physics if you want to become intelligent,
Study engineering if you want to become rich

>>11701288
Now what kind of bullshit is that? You can also get rich with a physics degree, you just have to work hard

>>11701549
>rich with a physics degree
You talking bout lottery matey?

>>11683123
Take an IQ test. If you score around or upwards of 130, go for it.

>>11685655
>>11685602
>>11688020
Non-sense. It is likely that any given class at a physics department of any somewhat reputable university will have exclusively students with an IQ of 120+, many with 130+.

>>11702642
Which online test is good? Can't go because expensive and corona

>>11700874
>can’t even read one (1) full sentence
you’re right, college wasn’t for you

>>11702642
>exclusively students with an IQ of 120+
kek this is pure cope

>>11702645
Mensa tests are alright

>>11702708
There's been quite a few studies on this. I personally don't even study physics, so Idk what I would be coping with.

>>11702879
blessed image

Throw yourself down a flight of stairs and ask yourself how long it took.

>>11703704
I think it took about 2.7 seconds, what's the next step again?

>>11703704
Why so hostile?

>>11704447
Because the thread is a useless piece of crap

>>11705898
Fuck you
t. OP

>>11703763
Do it again and again so you can calculate the average.

>>11684578
>I wanted to study maths because I was obsessed by primes and infinity
>I'm hardly working on the theory of everything or whatever. I mean I am, but for a hobby

you seem like a pretty cool dude anon, wish you all the luck in the world in your endeavours

>>11683123
I’m missing half my brain due to a freak size cyst and I can do college physics so what’s your fucking excuse?

>>11709224
I bet you lost the part needed for social interactions. Just kidding, what are the differences you feel compared to before the accident?

>>11709231
I was born with it. Probably my cigarette smoking and wine sipping mom has something to with it. I’m missing a lot of apparently important brain bits. Like I don’t have a Limbic system as traditionally seen. Yet I live and have emotions and can sleep. It’s weird. I am who I am.

>>11709231
I posted an ama in September that got a lot of attention. It’s an arachnoid Cyst but a big ass one.

>>11709224
having average iq

>>11709238
>>11709243
Sounds pretty interesting, any screencaps from the ama? Thanks for explaining and best of luck to you

>>11683123
You don't have to stick to any major in your first year. Take an intro physics class in college and see if you like it; if not, drop out of the class early.

>>11709267
That doesn't work everywhere though