Physics or chemistry...?

[Minuend]

Damn IRC-people putting doubts in my mind :<

Well, what appeals to me about chemistry on an abstract level is that it I kinda see it as the basic form of truth. Something like atoms being everywhere, moving. Chemistry shows how different reactions can occur. Chemistry is also a form of art to me in that way.

Physics is also a basic form of truth, it tells of forces controlling our world. It also seems more challenging (more fun?) and maybe it's even more exciting!

I haven't studied either physics or chemistry more than the very, very basics, so obviously I'm ignorant of their applications in full.

Also, I'm uncertain to how much a degree I'm able. There have been periods where I'm completely bummed out and think school is wayy wrong for me. But then there are days like this where I find everything interesting and love reading.

Anyone studying, working or having an interest in either have any thoughts what so ever? Or thoughts about what you like about your study/ work. Advantages, disadvantages. Career opportunities, anything really. How much did you work? Did you have days where you could actually relax?

Irrelevant thoughts:
I think the reason my motivation swings is because of my high expectations of myself. When I think I can't be badass in what I do, I kinda take it personally. But when I learn to just "fuck all", I am able to relax and study intensively. So I think if I work with myself and my attitudes, I can be good or something.

I have also never tried to study seriously in school, so I don't know to how much a degree I can get A's. Yes there has been a couple of subjects where I have gotten an A in high school without any particular effort. My average from high school is a little over C (number scale: 4,3 or something). So I think if I actually try, I can get at least an average of B. One of the problems with never taking school seriously is that you don't know what teacher/ professors want to hear (read) to give good grades.

 

[Felan]

It might be helpful to talk to the various professors and maybe even ask to sit in on several of the junior or even senior classes. You may not understand much of what they are talking about but you can get a bead on the vibe of the class. I did very poorly in the easy classes and very well when the teacher was dynamic, full of energy, and engaging. So if you one path leads to more of those sorts of teachers then the pay off will be greater in that direction.

Maybe all the physics teachers have TA's handling the classes and you never see them where the chemistry teachers tend to be present in the classes.

 

[Melllvar]

Are you trying to decide which one to major in? I thought you were already doing biochemistry/biotech stuff?

Anyways, chemistry will basically suck because of the labs. The theoretical material seemed really easy to me when I was in it. The expected mathematical ability of the students majoring in it was depressing too (chemistry majors aren't very good at math, nor do the classes require it, from my experience). Some people thought it was hard, but I think they'd just had it easy their entire life.

Physics is actually hard. I've told this story before but in my modern physics class at the last college I was at, 4/7 people failed, the class average was probably in the 30's, while I doubt I could possibly have gotten higher than 50/100 and I still ended up with a B (cause of the curve). That was a relatively easy class early in the curriculum, too, and these were *all* smart overachiever types. You will feel very stupid and inadequate, guaranteed, and that's not a slight on your intelligence.

I still did better in physics than chemistry though. Labs suck, especially when you're a social pariah who can't deal with the teachers or other students and hence are forced to do everything on your own and figure everything out yourself. Doing labs is hard when everyone in the class hates you and won't cooperate or speak to you. In physics you'll be doing that anyways; very little hands-on teamwork involved.

Note: I majored in and got fairly far along in both, but never graduated in either.

Anyways, I'd base it on:
1) How much you've hated doing chemistry labs in the past.
2) How depressed you get when you spend 10 hours solving one math problem only to find out you fucked it all up anyways.
3) What kind of job you're going for after school. Physics people mostly seem to end up in programming, engineering or financial/actuarial type stuff, I think, whereas chemistry has more direct applications, e.g. manufacturing, environmental sciences, pharmaceutics, etc.

 

[Minuend]

It's only my first year, I still have time to change my mind.

They don't have physics degrees at this uni. Then I'd have to go to Bergen or further North. But I would probably choose Bergen.

Ah, yes. I started thinking biology first. I was interested in science, but feared that too "heavy" stuff would bore me. In addition biology seemed the easiest. But you know, I kinda like a challenge. And I find more satisfaction knowing nature (universe) on a level which stretches beyond several items/ issues (bad wording). Chemistry isn't "heavy" like I thought I'd be either.

You were graded depending on the curve? Isn't that a bit more unfair than education already is?

And yeah, I kinda imagine all super intelligent people studying physics and I'll be like O_O

What job I want I don't know. I figure I have to immerse myself in the subject before finding out what area I'd choose.

I had a few chemistry classes back in high school, but I didn't care about school then so I kinda just went along with no opinion as to whether I liked it. Though, mostly all the answers to what would happen were given beforehand, so no curiosity needed. Which goes for the few labs I've had so far in uni.

How much time did you spend studying, Mellvar?

 

[ProxyAmenRa]

For a career choose chemistry. There are more jobs in industry for chemists.

 

[Melllvar]

You were graded depending on the curve? Isn't that a bit more unfair than education already is?

Yeah. Instead of having a set range for grades, e.g. 90-100 A, 80-89 B, etc., they just curve everybody up at the end anyways. That way they can give really hard problems (or ones over a wide range of difficulty) and not expect you to get more than half of them right. Plus when they have too many people in a program they can use this method to weed people out down to their quota for the program. They seemed to do that my first school a lot, where they always had waaay too many people for the classes.

How much time did you spend studying, Mellvar?

Uh, hard to say, I had semesters where I'd fail everything and others where I'd get straight As. I will say that even when I worked as hard as I could, pretty much studying all the time, 6-10 hours a day outside of class, I still couldn't get straight As, but I also was always taking a full schedule of usually the hardest classes available across several majors. So that affected it too. Then I'd have a bad habit of getting depressed and discouraged whenever I did less than perfect on anything, at which point I'd stop working completely, skip exams, stuff like that.

I'm not a very good example to follow. Anyways, I remember most physics problems would take at least an hour or two to solve, most of which would be spent just thinking about it/trying to find some connection to solve it. Some much longer; eventually I started realizing I needed at least a day or two to think about them, aside from actually writing stuff down. (E.g. read all the problems and try obvious solutions immediately, start thinking about them, answer randomly pops into your head three days later while you're taking a shower or something.)

Also some are literally just long, like doing Fourier transforms of multivariable functions by hand can easily take more than an hour, even though it's rather formulaic and tedious, no real thought required.

Anyways, you might check out these to see what you're getting into (with physics):

Modern Physics - Tipler (has problems divided into three levels of difficulty)
Classical Mechanics - Taylor
Electrodynamics - Griffiths (plus solution manual)
Quantum Mechanics - Shankar
Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering - Riley, Hobson, Bence (not the best to learn from, but very thorough) (solution manual)

 

[Minuend]

Yeah. Instead of having a set range for grades, e.g. 90-100 A, 80-89 B, etc., they just curve everybody up at the end anyways. That way they can give really hard problems (or ones over a wide range of difficulty) and not expect you to get more than half of them right. Plus when they have too many people in a program they can use this method to weed people out down to their quota for the program. They seemed to do that my first school a lot, where they always had waaay too many people for the classes.

I see. The physics and chemistry studies aren't that popular here,I determine from how many applied to the different unis in those subjects. Even thought there's only like 5 unis that offer physics (if that). So the applicants either have an average of B, or everyone got in because there was less students than places.

Uh, hard to say, I had semesters where I'd fail everything and others where I'd get straight As. I will say that even when I worked as hard as I could, pretty much studying all the time, 6-10 hours a day outside of class, I still couldn't get straight As, but I also was always taking a full schedule of usually the hardest classes available across several majors. So that affected it too. Then I'd have a bad habit of getting depressed and discouraged whenever I did less than perfect on anything, at which point I'd stop working completely, skip exams, stuff like that.

I suppose it's possible to avoid that kind of workload for 3-5 years to come, then.
I don't think it would humanly possible for very many years..

I'm not a very good example to follow. Anyways, I remember most physics problems would take at least an hour or two to solve, most of which would be spent just thinking about it/trying to find some connection to solve it. Some much longer; eventually I started realizing I needed at least a day or two to think about them, aside from actually writing stuff down. (E.g. read all the problems and try obvious solutions immediately, start thinking about them, answer randomly pops into your head three days later while you're taking a shower or something.)

Sounds more and more interesting.

Also some are literally just long, like doing Fourier transforms of multivariable functions by hand can easily take more than an hour, even though it's rather formulaic and tedious, no real thought required.

I have a tendency to miss a sign or number and then the rest of the work is fucked. I do like math though, always did. More or less.

Anyways, you might check out these to see what you're getting into (with physics):

Modern Physics - Tipler (has problems divided into three levels of difficulty)
Classical Mechanics - Taylor
Electrodynamics - Griffiths (plus solution manual)
Quantum Mechanics - Shankar
Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering - Riley, Hobson, Bence (not the best to learn from, but very thorough) (solution manual)

This is very helpful, Mellvar, thanks a bunch

At this moment I'm thinking starting on a physics degree in Bergen. If I don't like it, they have a lot of other sciency degrees I can jump to.

 

[Melllvar]

I see. The physics and chemistry studies aren't that popular here...

They aren't here either. Well, chemistry is kind of medium, but all the physics departments I was in (2, OSU and TSU) were about 1/10th the size of the chemistry departments.

Also physics, computer science, engineering and math never get any girls. I mean like a 0-10% rate; in a class of 30-40 people, 0-3 girls max. Life sciences are crowded with them, including chemistry. I doubt it's any different in Norway, so have fun with that, for better or worse.

(In the interests of gender equality: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/07/28/1943207/girls-go-geek-again)

I have a tendency to miss a sign or number and then the rest of the work is fucked. I do like math though, always did. More or less.

Physics actually favors that over other things. I said earlier that even when I worked as hard as I could I didn't get straight As (usually), part of that was just the error factor, and another part was not being able to finish problems during exams in time, much less have time to resolve them for error checking (this was particularly an issue with the aforementioned Fourier transforms in my PDEs class). In physics though you tend to get a smaller number of harder, longer-to-solve problems, focusing more on theory than just churning out a correct answer (as opposed to majors like mechanical/electrical engineering, which are similar to physics in a lot of ways). The types of stuff you'll be doing favors that kind of absent-minded-but-I'm-still-smart thing.

A lot of the other things I majored in like chemistry and engineering weren't as forgiving, since you're typically doing lots of relatively easy problems, more plug-and-chug formula stuff, with more steps and they're just grading you on correct answers and following the steps, whereas physics problems often have multiple solutions involving different levels of cleverness and things like that. (Not exaggerating here.)

Ok yeah, maybe I like the subject a bit. Sorry to ramble.

At this moment I'm thinking starting on a physics degree in Bergen. If I don't like it, they have a lot of other sciency degrees I can jump to.

It's not in the original question, but if you're just interested in everything science and technology in general, my personal view now is that computer science + math is the best combo (not necessarily for college, do that just to make money). They're sort of like the meta-disciplines behind all other disciplines. Those are pretty much applicable to every field imaginable. I mean with a good basis in those you'll be a whiz at physics, and probably better able to understand chemistry than most (undergrad) chem majors. Not to mention the similar applications to stuff like electrical engineering, finance, etc., and the fact that as far as teaching general problem solving skills, math, comp sci, and physics are about as good as it gets (imho).

I could expand on that reasoning a lot, but that's where I'd go with things personally (and where I'm trying to go with things, personally).


(EDIT: Btw, I make this sound all fun. Keep in mind I love it and I dropped out, not once but twice. It's a great thing to study, but majoring in it or doing it as a career is another deal. I just advocate people knowing what they're getting into rather than waste lots of money/time and then drop out/change majors anyways.)

 

[lucky12]

Both are great subjects.

If you have a respect for science as a whole, I doubt you will regret taking either.

Mel nailed it, there lies many 'intimidating' students in sciences. You will find them to be not so intimidating once you work with them, many of them aren't very focused in school. They just seem to be outspoken in class for some reason. A select few are genuinely interested, finding the cool ones is hard. A lot of people at my school right now segregate, its terrible. I make my assistance available to anyone who asks for it, after all we are in it together./rant

I prefer physics , I used to be into chemistry because I was very good at it. Then I got a few influential teachers, I love physics now.

No I am not a dork who calculates random relations with a white pocketed short sleeve button up shirt. I will see a crane and judge the forces acting upon it, marveling at it.

If you ever want to talk mechanical engineering, you know where I'm at.
-LKY

 

[Minuend]

They aren't here either. Well, chemistry is kind of medium, but all the physics departments I was in (2, OSU and TSU) were about 1/10th the size of the chemistry departments.

Also physics, computer science, engineering and math never get any girls. I mean like a 0-10% rate; in a class of 30-40 people, 0-3 girls max. Life sciences are crowded with them, including chemistry. I doubt it's any different in Norway, so have fun with that, for better or worse.

(In the interests of gender equality: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/07/28/1943207/girls-go-geek-again)

Minuend harem : D

It's interesting to read your experience with physics.

It's not in the original question, but if you're just interested in everything science and technology in general, my personal view now is that computer science + math is the best combo (not necessarily for college, do that just to make money). They're sort of like the meta-disciplines behind all other disciplines. Those are pretty much applicable to every field imaginable. I mean with a good basis in those you'll be a whiz at physics, and probably better able to understand chemistry than most (undergrad) chem majors. Not to mention the similar applications to stuff like electrical engineering, finance, etc., and the fact that as far as teaching general problem solving skills, math, comp sci, and physics are about as good as it gets (imho).

How would an education like that be? I mean, how is it built up? How is it connected to physics?

Both are great subjects.

If you have a respect for science as a whole, I doubt you will regret taking either.

Mel nailed it, there lies many 'intimidating' students in sciences. You will find them to be not so intimidating once you work with them, many of them aren't very focused in school. They just seem to be outspoken in class for some reason. A select few are genuinely interested, finding the cool ones is hard. A lot of people at my school right now segregate, its terrible. I make my assistance available to anyone who asks for it, after all we are in it together./rant

I prefer physics , I used to be into chemistry because I was very good at it. Then I got a few influential teachers, I love physics now.

No I am not a dork who calculates random relations with a white pocketed short sleeve button up shirt. I will see a crane and judge the forces acting upon it, marveling at it.

If you ever want to talk mechanical engineering, you know where I'm at.
-LKY

Thanks

 

[Melllvar]

Minuend harem : D

It's interesting to read your experience with physics.

No prob.

How is it connected to physics?

Well, I think of it as being sort of like those skill trees in Diablo and Civilization. E.g. mechanical engineering is mostly classical mechanics and thermodynamics (I'm sure any ME major would argue with the simplification), electrical is largely electrodynamics and PDE stuff, hence physics is a more basic thing to study since it will give you a good basis in both, and although not as much specific knowledge as an actual ME/EE guy, you can always pick that up later, very easily since you already know all the same stuff, maybe more considering you already know the underlying theories behind it all. It's the same thing with math and physics; physics is all just vector analysis, tensor analysis, PDEs, complex variables, statistics, linear algebra, group theory, so on and so forth. If you know more about all that stuff than a physics major, you probably know more about physics than they do too, or at least you'll be able to surpass their knowledge quite easily.

Plus there are fields pretty far removed from physics where all the same mathematical stuff will come up, e.g. biology, economics, game theory, etc. I mean, as one example, the formulas for continuously compounded interest (finance), Malthusian growth (biology), radioactive decay rates (physics) and Newton's cooling law (physics) are all the exact same ODE. Also the mathematical stuff is easily the hard part about physics. It's not like anyone really has trouble understanding the uncertainty principle or curved spacetime, they have trouble solving problems involving Fourier duals and curvature tensors and things like that.

The computer science thing mainly just because it's such a ubiquitous skill. What other field can you hope for high employment rates, good pay, potential for self-employment/working from anywhere, plus all the things you can do with it (e.g. software development, game development, security/cryptography, mathematical/computational modeling for pretty much any scientific field imaginable - physics, biology, genetics, neuroscience, chemistry, econ, pure math, sociology, etc. - there's just no end to it).

So yeah, like I said in a previous post about how chemistry majors typically didn't seem very good at math, I think with strong math + computer science skills you'd be better equipped to tackle most sciences than people who had solely studied that field, even. I mean the main thing physics has going for it, as a degree, is the versatility of it, and that mainly comes from the math + comp sci stuff, not the physics itself.

How would an education like that be? I mean, how is it built up?

With math (for physics) it generally goes something like:
Calculus & Multivariable calculus -> Linear Algebra, Ordinary Differential Equations & Vector Analysis -> Partial Differential Equations -> Complex Variables, plus maybe some statistics or special 'physics math' class depending on the school. That's not enough though, for even an undergrad physics major. Complex variables wasn't required for my QM class, but you still had to know lots of stuff from it from the very beginning. Really everything in that Mathematical Methods book is highly relevant, no exceptions.

For an actual math major it's mostly the same as physics, except they also have to take Advanced Calculus and Real Analysis (which are more about proofs and mathematical rigor), plus maybe a few other higher level electives instead of physics classes. We used to have this joke that the only difference between a physics and math major was a year of humanities (since they had to take extras, being technically in a different school or something stupid like that).

I'm not as familiar with CS, but I'd start with a programming language + data structures and algorithms. I never really got much farther than that, so no clue about the higher level stuff like operating systems, architecture, assembly language, etc.

Computer Science - Typical Requirements
Math Major - Traditional
Math Major - Bio
Math Major - Applied
Math Major - Applied Discrete

Keep in mind I'm just saying what I think it's most valuable to waste your time studying, not what it's best to major in at school. That's more about the ROI/things you can do after graduation vs. how miserable/stressed you're going to be for the next few years.

 

[lucky12]

Computer science is awesome. I was exposed to it for 3 years in high school in 5 different courses (good teachers). When I got to university I didn't go to class(ok i went twice) and it was my highest mark.

For me it took a lot of discipline to sit down and write out complex programs and learn from them. However, once you have the language down its just like writing a shitty essay.

 

[Jah]

Just the quick answer;

Chemistry.

Personally I'd actually say both, but the two are really interchangeable, while Chemistry is a slightly more applicable subject.



(Also, I think, Chemistry is slightly easier to grasp at first, so it's really one of the better places to start...)

 

[Latro]

Physics is by far the more "low level" one. There are definitely things that physicists don't know about that chemists do know about, however. My inorganic chemistry professor talked about this. Some solid state physicists were trying to tweak the properties of this compound by putting another element in its place...but its properties were not similar enough for the synthesis to even be possible. The fact that it wouldn't work was for a reason a chemist, who is intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the periodic table, would find obvious. Still, at the end of the day physicists know more detailed information than chemists.

 

[Agent Intellect]

I can't speak on a physics major, but as someone who has taken a lot of chemistry classes (I'm majoring in biochemistry) I can say that the main focus of chemistry is in application, not so much theory. Several of the classes I have to take are only labs, and don't have a lecture section. Wet chemistry techniques, instrumental analysis, separation techniques, and so on are stressed in higher level chemistry classes, while the theory aspect tends to supplement the lab work. So, if you go into chemistry, prepare to do some separations and titrations.

 

[A22]

Chemistry.

 

[Minuend]

Another thorough reply, Mellvar.

Well, the case is still strongest on the physics side D :
Perhaps especially astrophysics.

I'm certain, in two years I want to study math >_>

Theoretical work does sound a bit more interesting than mixing sulfur pentafluoride

 

[del]

My take on this:

Physics will stretch your intuition a lot more, since conventional pedagogy is to appeal to your visceral experience and imagination before introducing mathematical rigor.

This changes sometime in the second year or so, though, when "mathematical intuition" is more prominent, because in things like quantum mechanics, you won't be able to relay the material back to your everyday life, but by then you should have a sufficiently developed sense of mathematics that the equations come to life for you.

I've only taken two years of chemistry, but, fundamentally, the classes haven't really changed. The concepts are easy to understand, although the atomic world is outside our every day experience, and the focus is almost entirely on laboratory work. The curriculum WILL train you to be a lab technician before it trains you to be a scientist, which is necessary for this major.

However, what I really appreciate about chemistry is that it illustrates the rigor of science immediately: explain a concept, and don't believe it? Fuck you, here's the experiment. You just immediately DO something, see the experimental error, how the reaction precipitates, etc. etc.

I feel like I never really learned what "rigorous science" was until I started taking chemistry heavily. Physics was more just a fun application of math.

So, in a nutshell

Physics: more "lateral thinking" and mental gymnastics, lower emphasis on experimentation. This is probably because a lot of the concepts and mathematical techniques are VERY difficult to understand, and many modern physics experiments basically consist of a bunch of engineers and physicists designing a giant contraption, flipping the "on" switch and hoping they don't destroy the universe, so the curriculum, at least at my school, de-emphasized a lot of that.

Chemistry: a lab science, problems seem much more straight forward, higher emphasis on experimental consistency and accuracy. Not much theory, but honestly, there doesn't need to be a lot because the concepts are pretty easy. The experiments, for me, swing between being fascinating and astonishing, to being tedious and mundane. That's just the nature of the work. YOU WILL BE A LAB TECHNICIAN. Please understand that. In physics, we just sort of fucked around with oscilloscopes and built circuits, but chemistry is much more serious.

Full disclosure: former math/physics major (quit after 1st semmester QM), current biological anthropology/math major (finished one year organic chem + 1 semester bio-chem). Weird change, I know.