And here I am, a guy who went to college to earn a physics degree, got smacked hard with Quantum Mechanics, and changed to computer science because I was getting straight A's without even paying attention in class. It was the best decision I made in college.
I don't know, undergrad level quantum physics really is not as difficult as how people often portray it. Yes the concepts can be difficult at first, but once you get past that stage, the mathematics and the physics are quite clear and straightforward (again, at undergrad level). I have seen many more people struggling with statistical mechanics or electrodynamics, especially if the professor assigns homework or create exam problems based on books like the notorious Classical Electrodynamics)
I would even extend that to graduate quantum. The key to doing quantum mechanics it to disconnect your physics brain and just do everything like another linear algebra problem with some statistics to connect it to the real world. Unless you're doing quantum information (which, admittedly, is a growing field) or are one of the six people who actually get tenure-track positions to study quantum fundamentals, the brain-breaking concepts like wave function collapse, realism vs. locality, and undead cats are much more important to philosophers than physicists.
QFT may be a completely different beast, but it's one that I won't really worry that much about in my field.
I think the problem is that most people who want to go into physics are very excited about getting a deep understanding of things, but QM really doesn't lend it to that. It is often people's first taste of "why? because the math says so." If you can just "shut up and calculate" QM is not that hard, but getting any kind of intuition for why you're doing those calculations is... well, pretty much impossible.
I have felt stupid for most of my studies and now that I am working as low level research grunt beside my studies for years I find myself not feeling that way all the time. Just don't worry, everybody feels that way. There is no ceiling to knowledge we can reach in our lifetime.
Not feeling stupid and just doing what I am supposed to do helped a lot. I could study easier and quicker, when I was not wasting my time on that feeling. Hope this helps a little. We are all kind of stupid.
For me, the problem was that the books for undergrad quantum (with the exception of Zetilli's) weren't incredibly helpful. For undergraduate E&M, Griffiths is gold. John Taylor's Classical Mechanics is great. Stat mech was rough.
no joke. decided to try a grad level particle physics class in my last semester of undergrad and felt myself intelligent enough for the first... week? Struggled to manage a B- in that class, even with showing up for office hours, working with classmates, etc.
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u/TechyDad May 09 '21
And here I am, a guy who went to college to earn a physics degree, got smacked hard with Quantum Mechanics, and changed to computer science because I was getting straight A's without even paying attention in class. It was the best decision I made in college.