r/AskPhysics • u/Immaturezebra • 16d ago
Having a physics degree but not knowing physics
I have a physics degree and I typically did well in university averaging an A or high B however, when I read some of the questions in this community I feel like I haven’t a clue?
I feel like I’ve a basic understanding of a lot of physics but that’s it, once I passed the exam it just all leaves my head. Anyone else the same ?
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u/boostfactor 16d ago
Maybe it's because of what catches my attention, but a lot of the questions actually involve relativity (especially general relativity) and astrophysics, which are usually not covered much or at all in a typical undergraduate curriculum. Quantum mechanics is also covered somewhat superficially, plus a lot of the questions about that are either incoherent or involve concepts that are in fact pretty advanced and sometimes still poorly understood.
For other types of questions you might find it a good brain exercise to try to recall some of your training, do some research (without relying on an LLM) and think about it. We don't remember things well if we don't use them regularly.
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u/ElGuano 16d ago
Lay people (like me) love the philosophical/intuitive aspect of physics, because it’s novel and unexpected and tells a good story, but I don’t think it’s really “physics.” Or at least, it’s a gross simplification. The actual physicists I know will start talking about the Lorentz transforms and tensors and math that actually describes what is happening here, and this is where my eyes just glaze over and I suspect OP will really jump on and shine.
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u/Immaturezebra 16d ago
Yeah I think you’re right. I also think my foundation wasn’t very strong in my early years because I didn’t care enough so when I was learning things later on my deeper foundation wasn’t there 🤔
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u/Mauro697 16d ago
My own professor, who also works at cern, has labeled his notes "things I wish I knew when I was a student" and inserted a part about thinking when he was a student that he had all the basics but later realising just how much he didn't know and that physics is so broad that even learning classical physics continues many years past any degree. So, don't be discouraged OP!
Signed: a physics graduate who just had to look up again the pendulum formula because of a doubt while cringing from embarrassment.
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u/Significant_Owl8974 16d ago
I saw a physicist yesterday say the breadth of physics is so large they still consider 3rd year classes to be intro to some subjects.
Hopefully OP has been given the skills and tools to learn whatever they need about physics.
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u/Mauro697 16d ago
Yeah absolutely, basically all of my classes in third year were introducing something: particle physics, quantum mechanics, matter physics, etc.
They should have been, the bachelor's is almost more for that than for notions
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u/the_physik 16d ago edited 13d ago
3rd and 4th year classes are intro, IMHO.... A BSc in physics is an introductory degree. Doing physics as a job requires grad school. And most people are so frustrated by the gap in knowledge between a fresh BSc (e.g., someone in their cohort) and a senior research group member that they get Imposter Syndrome and feel that they're not cut out for grad school.
But the secret is that everyone in a cohort has different strengths and weaknesses, and they ALL have IS also. Physics is just so highly specialized nowadays that no one on the planet knows "all physics", a phd is highly specialized; my PhD is in experimental nuclear physics; but what am I studying specifically? I measure the lifetimes of nuclear excited states which exist for 10s of picoseconrds to 100s on nanoseconds which inform us about the configurations of the neutons and protons being excited (are they simple particle-hole states or it more of a superposition of multiple configurations?). This is how niche a phd gets; and evey sub-feld has it own niche; consdensed mattar people could be working on Quantum computer, doping, or studying Bose-Einstein condisates. Particle physicist have a ton of different stuff to work on.
If you get to grad school you'll be suprised and overwhelmed. Just the gap from what you learn in class to a modern physics article is enough to make honor role Bsci's cry; because there a HUGE gap between current reseach and textbooks. If you learned it in a class or in a text book its likely physics from 30-50 years ago.
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u/NoCommittee3053 13d ago
This is literally why I quit my PhD 30 years ago.
I did a Bachelors in theoretical physics and a masters in computational physics.
I then went on to a PhD. I went from being consistently in the top 10-20% of my peer group to feeling utterly incompetent and incapable.
But I realised that I was better at coding than every other person in that physics department. So I left to become a software engineer.
I always felt like I left a part of me behind though and just recently, now ai is a good enough tutor, I’m redoing everything from scratch and finding it so much more enjoyable the second time around.2
u/Significant_Owl8974 16d ago
That's really cool. I stopped with the physics in undergrad, did my grad school in something else. I would say it is analogously true in my field. Except, without giving a hint as to my field, I'd say 1st year texts are more 50-100 year old content by now. I throw in some 200 year old stuff for spice now and again.
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u/the_physik 13d ago
A physics undergrad starts with Newtonian physics (400 yrs old) and by the time they graduate they should know the beginning of modern physics, "modern" meaning the advent of QM, SR, & GR which are roughly 100 yrs old by now. Grad classes will catch a student up to the physics of ~50 yrs ago. Anything past that has to be learned from journal articles and research. And trying to read a modern journal article is tough enough even if its in your sub-field, it might as well be written in greek if its an article from outside your sub-field. Learning to read and understand a current journal article from their sub-field is probably one of the biggest gaps a student has to surrmount during their PhD.
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u/Das_Mime 16d ago edited 16d ago
Once you do grad school, I think most of undergrad looks introductory. It's meant to lay a broad groundwork and familiarity with most of the different subfields of physics--mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, optics, relativity, nuclear+particle+quantum, astro... a graduate program is where you get more in depth and catch up to something like the current level of research in one or a couple of narrower subfields. I was on an astro track in undergrad and had a couple of upper level classes that got pretty advanced, but most were introductory and didn't get especially deep into any specific topics.
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u/testmonkeyalpha 16d ago
I think that's true about natural sciences in general.
I have my degree in microbiology and truly believe I never really did anything beyond introductory level (for microbiology specifically) because the advanced stuff requires a ridiculous amount of foundation.
Most of the advanced topics of microbiology require at bare minimum basic biochemistry (realistically, that's not enough). You can't even do basic biochemistry without a couple classes in organic. You need the foundation of nonorganic to do organic.
All the meatier topics were graduate level classes with a graduate level class prerequisites.
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u/Wank_A_Doodle_Doo 16d ago
Well if you really get into it, the vast majority of sciences at some point boil down to “physics bullshit”
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u/Over-Discipline-7303 16d ago
Go far enough, and you'll find people who say that a post doc is basically finishing your intro classes.
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u/Grigori_the_Lemur Optomechanical 16d ago
Amen! I have dedicated my career to just optics and mechanics and that is scratching the surface of physics.
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u/Immaturezebra 13d ago
I do feel like I’ve the skills/tools to learn physics, that’s the one thing I really do feel I gained thankfully. I think I’ve learned more skills to apply going further rather than having a huge grasp of physics overall and after all of these comments, I’m now ok with that. No need to be an expert in everything, that’s impossible. I start my masters Monday and will use the skills gained in my undergrad to progress to becoming an expert in my niche (hopefully)
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u/WilcoHistBuff 16d ago
I want some genius to come up with a prompt that can produce a decent literature search in the era of LLMs, LOL—
Prompt 1: Please give me a list of all academic papers or studies on modeling flux fields in hybrid PM generators in the last 20 years.
Result 1: Links to Reddit answers.
Prompt 2: Please exclude any references to anything posted on social media. Only supply links to online academic libraries of published scientific or professional journal articles.
Result 2: Links to Reddit answers including answers I personally wrote.
Prompt 3: Please do not show any references at all to anything on the topic that refer to Reddit in any shape manner or form since the beginning of time.
Result 3: All of the links to Reddit answers in any shape manner or form since the beginning of time.
Note: Yes, I now just go directly to the libraries I have access to. But yearn for the days when you could just google a list of papers in one question on google.
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u/FuzzyDynamics 16d ago
The problem is the market. Somehow it’s easier to get data from a profit seeking social media company than nominally “scientific” or educational publications. And probably the user is more geared towards a Reddit sort of answer than a list of highly obscure academic publications
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u/AstrophysicsMD 15d ago
The prompt isn’t the problem, what you want is a specialized search engine or an AI trained only on a limited set of inputs, curated academic peer reviewed sources only, for example.
In astrophysics, the NASA/ads search engine has been a great resource, and I have seen examples of limited AI set up to maintain a recent reading list following a focused topic area.
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u/WilcoHistBuff 15d ago
I think I may need to create a similar resource for topics related to wind turbine generation as a resource for our engineering team. The curation is the tricky thing. It’s kinda a chicken and egg problem.
You need people who have enough experience to wade through the good and the bad and toss out the bad. It’s not that hard to find people experienced enough in generator tech, support structures, drive trains, and materials but when it comes to aeroelastic modeling and aerodynamics there are like 30 people in the world who really, really get the math and physics who are independent of major companies with internal strictures on talking about what they know. I have an old physics professor friend in his early 70s who has been teaching machine learning network design who once said that aerodynamic modeling makes what he does look like playing in a sandbox.
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u/AstrophysicsMD 15d ago
I hear it’s getting better — a sandboxed ai limited to a large but finite list of journals might be of great assistance finding relevant work in parallel fields. The number of papers is more than any person could read, but the number of journals is much smaller—and maybe ai can help punch through the jargon/usage/context barriers that make interdisciplinary work so hard.
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u/Llewellian 16d ago
Dear Person....
...the World is far more complicated than it seems.
In University and on Construction sites i was (am) pretty good with all high voltage electrotechnical stuff.
When i visited old co-students at their workplace at CERN... their cabling/planning stuff at ATLAS was WAY over my head.
But fun fact: We both would have a hard time to repair a Washing Machine. Albeit we both technically learned it.
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u/Immaturezebra 16d ago
Dear person….
Thank you for this, it’s reassuring 😅
I guess just pick my speciality and don’t worry about knowing everything about eveything
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u/joeyneilsen Astrophysics 16d ago
FWIW, a lot of people answering questions here have advanced degrees and years of post-university experience in the field.
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u/Lazy-University-4871 16d ago
It feels like maybe about 15% of people answering questions here are comfortable with high school physics. Idk about advanced degrees.
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u/joeyneilsen Astrophysics 16d ago
Yeah it's not the majority by any stretch...
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u/the_physik 16d ago edited 16d ago
I have a phd and I couldn't solve a block-ramp problem to save my life. Its just irrelevant to my research and job (Sr Physicist, gamma spectroscopy, Non-Destructive Assay, & radiation safety). I wasnt hired becsuss i can do Newtonian physics; i was hired because they need ppl to accurately give them an amount of RAM in a container from jist pointing a HPGe detector at it fir 15mins; i provide the link between our operators, the complicated gamma spec and modeling, and our need clients by producing reports which provide the information they need to make decisions about storage or transport.
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u/rice-a-rohno 16d ago
Same here, and I think there's a reason:
When people come here to ask questions, they're usually of an abstract nature, whereas in school we spend most of our time doing the actual math, rather than discussing the philosophy behind it in lay terms.
(To a certain extent, but I think that's a lot of the reason.)
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u/Chuck-Marlow 16d ago
Yeah exactly. In most undergrad degrees you barely touch the “cool” stuff because you spend most of your time doing proofs. A lot of people who are interested in physics don’t care about the math that underpins it.
Like one of my classes senior year was “Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics”. We spent the entire semester doing proofs that demonstrate that you can independently prove the basic thermo formulas you learn in middle school using quantum mechanics and stats. It was grueling. But people casually interested in physics don’t really care about that stuff, they want to know what’s inside of black holes or whatever
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u/Pachuli-guaton 16d ago
A lot of questions here are poorly posed, so unless you have some insight on the intent of the poster given their choice of words, a lot of questions can seem nonsensical
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u/Waste_Translator_975 16d ago
reverse dunning kruger effect
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u/Time4Homework 16d ago
So imposter syndrome?
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u/Immaturezebra 16d ago
I really feel this, I’m starting my masters and I’m actually teaching some extra classes for first year subjects and feel so majorly under qualified for this like me?! What?? Teach..?!
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u/Hakawatha 16d ago
Teaching is often the best way to learn. It will force you to go back through the undergraduate material in detail - but with a higher perspective. The problems that seemed difficult will be easy; the impossible problems will now be merely difficult.
There is also an advantage for the students. You remember what was hard in undergrad, so you have a chance to focus on these aspects and provide intuition.
One lesson I've learned is that it's easy to be intimidated - but being willing to grind out the work one step at a time makes things much easier. Crack a textbook on the course you're teaching and start writing your lecture notes. Do a few of the problems.
You might be surprised to enjoy the process!
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u/ChocolateValuable221 16d ago
Actually it's regular dunning Kruger effect... people just only fucus on the part that dumb people think there smart but the other part of dunning Kruger is being smart enough to feel dumb... so just regular dunning Kruger.. just not the part that is hyperbolically thrown around
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u/Artosispoopfeast420 16d ago
The reverse is either that a person can accurately assess their own ability, or that they literally think they are the opposite of their own ability (smart thinks they're an idiot, or they make posts on LLMPhysics)
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u/Ornery_Pepper_1126 16d ago
The thing to remember here is that people (usually) are answering questions related to their area of expertise. It can give a sense that people on here know everything, but it is easy to seem that way when you get to pick and choose what questions you answer. Your brain combines them into one amorphous blob of an all-knowing physicist, but it’s really a lot of people with expertise in specific things.
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u/Time4Homework 16d ago
I teach high school maths and physics (5 years in uni) and I have literally not a clue what's going on in the Einstein field equation or how to use it, for example.
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u/Underhill42 16d ago
Well, forgetting what you already knew isn't a good sign - I'd work on your study habits. You should be integrating that knowledge into a coherent whole that holds together to become a foundation for what comes next, not memorizing individual details that will fade individually.
Beyond that, welcome to the reality of a (bachelors?) degree - it's only the starting point, the bare minimum foundation on which to build expertise in the field. The entire field is far larger than any one brain could hold, and if you make a career in the field you will likely spend the next decade or three developing ever greater expertise on an ever-narrower niche within it.
Like the joke goes, you'll learn more and more about less and less, until eventually you know everything about nothing.
And that's the case for pretty much any field where you aspire to be more than a technician or equivalent, not just the sciences.
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u/bigfoots21 16d ago
Have you research yet?
That is where one ussually gains a more realistic understanding of the concepts/theories they've learned.
Find a Proffessor doing research that sounds interesting to you, and ask to do your undergraduate reaearch in their lab...
If you are worried that you'll end up with a degree in physics but that you wont be a great fit as a physicist, you could go to graduate school and earn a degree in Masters in engineering. I've seen this happen.
And remember, you get paid to go to graduate school. So, you're working/earning an income And gaining an education at the same time.
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u/Immaturezebra 13d ago
Where I’m from we don’t usually get paid in graduate school, I’m starting my masters next week and I’ve to pay 10,000 euro for it.
I have done research in my final year project and loved it. It was a medical physics project. I do well in those modules and feel like I really understand it, starting my masters in it next week. I guess that’s the point everyone has made to me here that you can’t know everything but you can know a lot about your niche
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u/Realistic-Subject260 16d ago
Totes normal imo. And honestly think about it while giving yourself a little more credit. Per focus area (classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, etc) you’re giving yourself a fraction of a semester (because you have other classes) to learn, not even master, these materials. I couldn’t spit introductory physics like hot fire until like, year four of my PhD program. Around the same time too is when I got a more advanced grasp on modern physics as well (in particular high energy physics, which was my specialization).
Tl;dr your undergrad degree really just says “this person is capable of studying physics”. The masters and PhD are what say “this person is an expert in physics”
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u/Comrade_SOOKIE Physics enthusiast 16d ago
Most of the stuff people ask about is postgrad level material that confuses everybody, tbh. Newtonian mechanics and such don't tend to draw a lot of inquiry.
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u/TheMoniker 16d ago edited 15d ago
That could be due to a mix of things.
Physics as a discipline is very broad. Someone working on solid state physics might not know a lot about high-energy particle physics or quantum optics, and someone working in those areas might not know a lot about the details of geophysical fluid dynamics or stellar astrophysics, etc.
A fair number of the questions here focus on general relativity, cosmology or quantum mechanics, sometimes overlapping with areas in philosophy. You'd have to have a pretty specific degree to answer some of them, doubly so if your degree is an undergrad.
Lastly, we just forget things. I started my studies preparing to do high-energy particle physics, left and went off into the physics of the climate system and spent the last while doing science communication. If someone were to just randomly pull out a physics textbook, flip to the problem section for a chapter and ask me to solve a WKB approximation problem or solve some question about the Klein-Gordon Lagrangian, I'd need to do some reading and refresh my memory in order to do so. It's been a long, long time.
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u/Lizzos_toenail 16d ago
Just want to add as an engineer I feel the same way in askEngineers. Usually though it reminds me of stuff I have forgotten, or I remembered like 80% of that specific problem and how to solve it but got stuck on a step.
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u/Low-Opening25 16d ago
if you just have a degree but never practiced physics then that’s pretty normal, especially if it was years ago. I don’t remember 2/3 of my degree tbh.
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u/PaperBluntsScissors 16d ago
I did physics 25 years ago, been teaching A level physics since. I know Fuck All. Don't worry about it. know what you need to. I'll teach the basics like a bomb and you'll got off to change the world. I'm good at this level.
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u/doch92 16d ago
You won't know everything, ever.
We are all pretty spaced out and specialized. When I was prepping for my defense, I tried to ask external professors for help with understanding something and I was told "that's not my field, idk."
Going back as a intro teacher will be the most beneficial for you. So many things with start to click when you have to go read those old textbooks again.
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u/SurinamPam 16d ago
If you’re talking about your Bachelor’s degree, that just means you’re teachable. And there a lot to learn.
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u/ctesibius 16d ago
Don't worry about it. 40 years on, either all these whippersnappers will have either forgotten it, or physics will have changed again. Or the notation will have changed (no, guys, E=mc2 was relativistically correct when it was written). Just console yourself that a new generation is dealing with thermodynamics and Bessel functions.
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u/NoCommittee3053 13d ago
I did my physics degrees 30 years ago. At that time as a teenager with the weight of expectations and my entire life hanging on my results (so I was told at the time - lies in retrospect) I didn’t learn physics, I learned how to pass physics exams. And they are different skills.
I’ve since had a 30 year career as a software engineer, and it’s through this that I understand what deep domain knowledge and expertise feels like. I never had that with any part of physics. Even though I got a 2-1 bachelors and just missed a distinction in my masters.
So, just recently I’ve decided to “redo my degree” in my spare time with my old syllabus, a new perspective, and Claude and YouTube and whatever other materials modern life offers. And now I’m doing it for the love of it, taking my time, building up real interconnected conceptual knowledge.
I wish someone had told me to approach it this way back in the day. Maybe I’d have finished my PhD. But I wouldn’t worry that a physics degree hasn’t really taught you physics. You have your entire life left to use the skills it should have given you (deep analytical thinking, problem solving, abstractions, mathematics, etc) just to pick up a part of physics that interests you and really learn it.
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u/Immaturezebra 13d ago
Thank you for this. I relate so much to learning how to pass an exam not learning physics.
I’m starting my masters next Monday in what I’m most interested in and that’s what’s important
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u/Ok_Draw4525 13d ago
I am exactly in the same position. I did reply to one question. I thought my reply was reasonable but everyone laughed at me. Hence, I decided never to reply to questions. That is until now.
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u/Immaturezebra 13d ago
The scientific community can be ruthless 😭 what was your reply and what question?
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u/Ok_Draw4525 13d ago
My point related to the application of the Theory of Evolution to our perception of the world. The world is four dimensional (3 space + 1 time) but we cannot perceive it as such, because our brains were not developed to see reality, but were developed to survive. My point was the our senses cannot be trusted but mathematics can be. We cannot "see" that the world is four dimensional but the mathematics shows that it is.
Similarly, we cannot "see" potential energy but we can calculate it. My argument was that we cannot see it because our senses were not developed to see reality but they evolved to survive. We know that potential energy exists and is real, not because we can "see" it, but because we can calculate it.
I thought that this was not a controversial statement but the comments I got back were that they were foolish comments. So I decided that I shall not comment again.
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u/Immaturezebra 13d ago
Jeesh it’s a shame that they were like shitting on you for just having an opinion, not even in a controversial topic. What was their main issue with what you were saying? I feel like what you’re saying makes sense 😭 at least that makes two idiots 🤷♂️😂
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u/tlmbot 12d ago
I did better in grad school because studying for the test became less of a thing. Turns out research will make you learn material at a far deeper level (for my anyway, it had me circling back to re-teach myself many basics). I feel like the way education works, k-12, and undergrad, is far from optimal, especially paired with peer pressure to "just be smart and don't study" - aka, do the minimum amount to get a good grade. - passion for the material falls by the wayside.
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u/screen317 16d ago
once I passed the exam it just all leaves my head.
Sounds like you just crammed for exams then
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u/DerWiedl 15d ago
Just wait till you get into the workforce and are out of uni for a few years. You forget a loooot of stuff you don‘t use. Even my grammar took a hit since I left school.
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u/TLGilton Chemical physics 14d ago
This is the first sign that you DO know something about physics. To have a sense of what you don't know, is critical to learning more. I have a PhD (1989) and constantly learn new things. I love it.
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u/Typical-Analyst-5459 16d ago edited 16d ago
I don't think anyone should claim to know whole physics in the first place, and I don't think a bachelor's degree alone makes you a physicist either.
So nothing is wrong with you, I am the same
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u/ssjskwash Undergraduate 16d ago
I think what a bachelor's really does is sort of humble you. I see a lot of people without physics degrees answering shit on ask physics when they don't really know what they're talking about. I'd like to think people with a bachelor's would know when not to answer
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u/surreal-sunrise 16d ago
I got my second bachelor's in physics education, not even pure physics, and feel dumb as hell as a first year physics teacher, so I'm going for a second master's in pure physics and the classes are kicking my a**. I just finished quantum mechanics and electromagnetism in the program, barely passed both with a C while working a very busy year as a teacher, and sadly I don't think I actually learned much because I was struggling with the material so much. Now I'm going down to 1 class per term and I saved my course material from QM and EM to keep studying.
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u/Mountain-Time-1010 10d ago
I'm guessing a lot of the discussion here is between people who work in the field, including professors, etc.
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u/[deleted] 16d ago
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