If theres anything that I took away from my 3 years of trying to get a physics degree before burning out on it around covid hit, its that like half of physics seems to be just figuring out what approximations you can safely make to turn something infeasibly complicated into something that can actually be worked out
Which, if you extrapolate that to humanity's understanding of the universe, is the cornerstone of science. We know a lot, but we know a lot less than there is to know.
What degree did you end up pivoting to? I'm curious because I was a physicist who got into algorithm development.
I didnt really pivot to anything, I was very unsure what I wanted to do at that point, and being quite bad at learning virtually, which of course most everything had temporarily pivoted to at that time, I took an opportunity to move in with a family member in a different state that I liked better. Ive not gone back to school since as Ive been worried about spending a lot of time and effort and money on something that I cant see through to completion again or wont like using. Ive ended up working a low volume manufacturing type job at a company that makes measuring equipment (microscopes and spectroscopy devices and such like that), which Ive found tolerable enough as the work has some amount of variation, isn't too physically or socially demanding, and at least has some scientific relevance (it doesn't involve doing any science, but scientists cant do their work without the right equipment, so making some of that equipment still feels helpful in some small way). Ive thought about going back at some point if I can come up with something Im sure I'll prefer doing, but so far have not and have no immediate plans.
I went back to college in 2021 hoping to ride the recession recovery up with a new degree, got a 2 year Networking degree and I caught the tail end of the Great Resignation and snagged a pretty good job immediately after graduation.
I highly recommend going back whenever you feel up for it. Going into it when your even just a few years older means you can better appreciate the opportunities available to you, plus it's a chance to do things you might not otherwise have done. For example, I stumbled into joining student government, and that was a blast traveling all over to visit other colleges for legislative meetings on the college's dime. I made several friends and generally came out a better person
You could even do the crazy thing I did which is going back even though you really should wait, because my wife was pregnant! I started a semester the day after we returned from the hospital after my youngest child's birth. I'm...not doing that again haha
Yep. All models are wrong, some are useful.
That's pretty much the same in most fields, especially in the engineering direction. Idealized gases are idealized, steel beams are assumed to have a certain stiffness just by convention, and your entire existence is represented by a bunch of form fields stored in a database somewhere.
Isn't a lot of engineering basically applied physics though anyway? Just reversed, such that rather than studying or predicting how a physical system should behave, you're trying to take what has been learned over time and use it to work backwards to create a system that exhibits desired behavior
In the sense, medicine is applied physics, just as everything else.
Thing is, you always break down a problem into just enough details to solve the problem. Not more. No physicist studying, say, airflow over the Atlantic will take quantum effects or relativistic effects into account. Magnetic fields are also ignored. Even clouds are surprisingly "low res" in most simulations.
Mathematics is the only true science.
Physics is applied mathematics.
Chemistry is applied physics.
Biology is applied chemistry.
Psychology is applied biology.
Sociology is applied psychology.
Et al.
In the sense, medicine is applied physics
I mean yeah. Insert the relevant XKCD here.
But in a more direct sense, medicine is applied chemistry. (With chemistry itself being applied physics.)
Penguins have some really janky hitboxes that absolutely break the meta
Devs please nerf orcas.
The advantages the human "oligarch" subclass has will never be enough for them.
They need to make that subclass an alternative food source for other classes in a future update.
There were few events in France and Russia that were exactly this
So every first person player character is actually modeled after penguins ? This explains the head bobbing!
ah yes, a classic "assuming that cows are spherical" posting
That is a pretty close approximation.
Found the physicist.
Are there non circular cylinders? Isn't a cylinder by definition circular?
Well if you made a penguin into an approximate cylinder it would likely be oval shaped soo since we are talking approximations I would say yes, there are cylinder like shapes that are not circular
under an appropriate level of abstraction you can make lots of types of cylinders. in topology you can define a cylinder of a (topological space) X to just be X × [0,1]. this kind of definition comes up pretty frequently, and is used to create mapping cylinders, which i suppose are another type of cylinder.
the “normal” kind of cylinder is then just (circle) × [0,1], or (filled in circle) × [0,1], depending on whether you want it to look like an empty paper towel roll or a (full) can of beans
I'll just trust you on that, I suppose
When you want to show that this knowledge will be needed in life:
Being able to work with useful approximations is an important and liberating skill for many tasks.
Everyone playing Minecraft
Don't you prefer a 1m x 1m cube?
Yes, but a Mincrafter assumes that the penguin is a cylinder
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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