562
xkcd #2904: Physics vs. Magic
(imgs.xkcd.com)
Alt text:
'At the stroke of midnight, your brother will be hurtling sideways at an altitude of 150 meters' is a regular physics prediction about your nonmagical trebuchet, whereas 'you are cursed to build a brother-launching trebuchet' falls out of the Lagrangian.
I felt the same way until I had to take a statistics class for a second bachelors I'm working on as a middle aged person. The class was "statistics for non STEM majors" and the extremely chill, aging surfer dude prof approached it like we were all easily spooked horses and math was a snake.
He didn't even tell us when we took our midterm, he told us it was a quiz that he was offering lots of extra tutoring sessions for. He didn't tell us until weeks later when someone asked when the midterm would be. He really went out of his way to explain down to the roots of each equation about how and why it works.
By the end of it I didn't feel like I was missing the part of my brain that can do math anymore.
A lot of math involves just moving things around until the problem is easier. It's just a bunch of tricks that work for relatively simple reasons. But you just memorize them to make it easier.
Statistics is more like magic than other kinds of math. Like when you have more than 30 random unbiased selections from a population you can start guessing at the composition of the whole, no matter how large it is. The explanations require someone who really knows what's going on.
Then you have modern LLMs that use statistics to produce the next word in a sentence. They can be so complex the designers don't really know why they do what they do. It's just trial and error testing the outcomes.
Biology bs required 5 units of physics, physics was 3+1 for the lab. I haaaaate physics, love my chemistry, I'm pretty bad at higher math, physics just tries to be as tricky as possible while hiding behind the shroud of "this is how it works in life". They made a "physics for biologists"class which was as much practical application of physics as they could put into a 1 unit 1 night per week course. I learned more, better, talking point physics in that class than any other.
Finals week was an optional "sasquatch" lecture that was open to anyone we wanted to bring, it was attended by more people than were actually in the class.
We learned how drag coefficients worked, how a great white child swim from California to Japan in 1 bite of food, how a blue whale and a bacteria both use the same amount of energy to move a distance. How terminal velocity means you can't drop a mouse to it's death. The optics of eyes.. greatest physics course ever.