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Maths vs physics help!!

I’m better at physics but I enjoy maths more and I really don’t like the practicals we have to do in physics.
I’m not sure what course to do at uni. I’m thinking maybe one with maths and physics or theoretical physics as I assume that would be mostly maths? Ideally it wouldn’t have any practicals or would have very minimal practical aspects.
Does anyone know any courses that could be good for me?
Please help!! Thanks
(edited 4 years ago)
Original post by Lightleaf
I’m better at physics but I enjoy maths more and I really don’t like the practicals we have to do in physics.
I’m not sure what course to do at uni. I’m thinking maybe one with maths and physics or theoretical physics as I assume that would be mostly maths? Ideally it wouldn’t have any practicals or would have very minimal practical aspects.

Most theoretical physics courses will have a year 1 and possibly much of year 2 in common with a "standard" physics course (+/- some extra maths) so you will probably end up doing some lab work. However university level practicals tend to be _very_ different to those at school, much more ambitious, big piles of decent equipment you can get your hand on rather than a single scope being demonstrated to a class of 30, a requirement to develop your own computer code to analyse / model results etc. It turns out that theoreticians actually need those practical skills to be able to do their job, you need to appreciate how to test a theory, or its not science, and writing up lab work is your 1st proper introduction to how to publish a paper.

Take a look at the course specs below for an example ..... note the "less emphasis on experimental work than our standard Physics" comment. Less is not zero.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/physics-department/theoretical-physics-msci/
Reply 2
do maths and fm
Reply 3
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Original post by Mr Wednesday
Most theoretical physics courses will have a year 1 and possibly much of year 2 in common with a "standard" physics course (+/- some extra maths) so you will probably end up doing some lab work. However university level practicals tend to be _very_ different to those at school, much more ambitious, big piles of decent equipment you can get your hand on rather than a single scope being demonstrated to a class of 30, a requirement to develop your own computer code to analyse / model results etc. It turns out that theoreticians actually need those practical skills to be able to do their job, you need to appreciate how to test a theory, or its not science, and writing up lab work is your 1st proper introduction to how to publish a paper.

Take a look at the course specs below for an example ..... note the "less emphasis on experimental work than our standard Physics" comment. Less is not zero.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/physics-department/theoretical-physics-msci/


Those practicals sound stressful! I think the main thing about practicals is that I’m not as confident in it as theory and it feels like so much could go wrong, but I can see how practical work would be important for the theory. I guess I could put up with it for a year or maybe two if it gives me a better understanding in general.
Thanks for the help :smile:
Original post by Lightleaf
Those practicals sound stressful! I think the main thing about practicals is that I’m not as confident in it as theory and it feels like so much could go wrong, but I can see how practical work would be important for the theory. I guess I could put up with it for a year or maybe two if it gives me a better understanding in general.

Practicals are fundamentally different to lecture based courses and develop different skills, you need "the complete package" to be a good physicist, so UG labs are there to build skills and confidence. Interestingly, it tends to be very hard to fail a practical course, much more so than failing an exam. Practicals are spread out over an extended period and assessed by reports and continuous assessment, so much less damage from one bad day. It also tends to be harder to do very very well in lab, because you need to apply multiple skills all at once to do a "perfect" job, not just deliver a single well defined proof of an equation.

Its expected that things do not go smoothly all the time in lab and you will make mistakes and learn from them. Your demonstrators will understand this very well as its how they spend much of thier life as well. If you ask a PhD student or a professional research physicist how much of their lab work generates "gold standard data" its about 5%. A naïf view is that they must be wasting loads of time ...... a more informed view from experience is all that "lost" time is actually spent doing the essential job of understanding the problem and working out how to do the experiment well, while trimming off all those ways of failing that looked good at the start.

So in summary, enjoy your lab work, it wont all be perfect and obvious from the start and its not mean to be. The end goal is to get to the point where you can visualise an idea or a cool thing to try to do / measure and build everything required from the ground up and make it work. That takes a good few years of experience, but the end result is one of the most rewarding things in science.
(edited 4 years ago)

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