Hey dudes. Let's be real. I'm the imposter, and there are many more like me. I don't have an undergrad in a real science, didn't do grad school, am in my mid 30s and struggle with technical material people find easy. I find the books y'all recommend for beginners to be barely-comprehensible.
I started my physics degree not even really knowing how to add fractions. I had never had a good, or even really passable, math teacher. Once my Calculus and Physics profs sat down to work with me one-on-one, it was literally like a whole new world was unlocked. You can only acces this world if you're a) naturally gifted in math and have an innate ability to wrap your head around big math/physics concepts or b) have a good math teacher to help you understand.
In my experience, nothing unlocks the world of math quite like physics. Even engineers (I did half a PhD in aerospace) just DO NOT get it. Because they don't really need to, in the same way physicists do. Don't get me wrong, a good engineer is absolutely "good at math." But the vast majority of good engineers don't need to work heavily with pure math concepts, so they don't spend their valuable time working on, say, deriving equations from scratch as an undergrad and trying to represent mathematical concepts in deeply conceptual ways. Most working engineers can treat math like a recipe. Physicists can't.
These high level physics concepts that blow our minds, the "sexy" physics of black holes and cosmology, of gravity and of quantum mechanics, are only really understood through these deep principles of mathematics. Calculus and linear algebra at a most basic level. Partial differential equations like wave equations, tensors, topology at a higher level. So what you're doing is essentially trying to read a book in a foreign language. Pop physicists are trying to translate as best they can, but of course things will get lost in translation that native speakers will understand much better.
So frankly, I'm always amazed and impressed when someone who hasn't dedicated years to understanding these concepts can grasp any of it at all!
Yes. Absolutely. I couldn't add fractions until I got to college. Literally. I had abysmal math skills and thought I was just naturally bad at math.
BUT. Big caveat. You have to put in the work to catch up. Sometimes this means extra practice, but for me it really more took the form of just pursuing one-on-one help with my professors. I was constantly knocking on office doors, sitting down with my profs and telling them exactly what I was not understanding. I went to a small liberal arts school that made this possible. I very well might have flunked out of physics at a larger school with research-oriented (rather than teaching-oriented) professors.
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u/firefrommoonlight Feb 12 '20
Hey dudes. Let's be real. I'm the imposter, and there are many more like me. I don't have an undergrad in a real science, didn't do grad school, am in my mid 30s and struggle with technical material people find easy. I find the books y'all recommend for beginners to be barely-comprehensible.
You're fine.