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Asked by anon-205619 to Russell, Kathryn, Jose Angel, Gabriel, Affelia, adeliegorce on 4 Mar 2019.
Question: whats the most complicated area of science
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Russell Arnott answered on 4 Mar 2019:
I must say I think that Physics is the most complicated area. You deal with sizes that are so big that the human brain can’t really understand them (eg astrophysics) and numbers so small that the human brain can’t understand them (quantum physics)!
You need to be really good at maths and also be able to visualise and understand abstract concepts that can be difficult to describe using words.
To be honest, my research is no where near as complicated as what some of the other scientists in this zone do!
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Affelia Wibisono answered on 4 Mar 2019:
I think it really depends from person to person. I find abstract things like quantum physics very difficult because I can’t relate to it and I remember that I was absolutely terrible at chemistry when I was at school!
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Gabriel Gallardo answered on 5 Mar 2019: last edited 5 Mar 2019 3:17 am
They say Einstein once said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
As a physicist, I’m always a bit flattered whenever tells me what I’m doing is hard, but honestly there’s nothing I’d rather being doing. Physics is the easiest thing for me because I’m driven by my curiosity. I really do want to know how the world works, and physics is the way I like to learn about it.
All of modern science is quite complicated, really, because we (the human race) have been working at it for so long. Imagine if your class was given a school project and 400 years to do it, you’d expect to get quite a lot done in that time!
Because science can be complicated, most people specialize in only one area and try to learn everything they can in their area.
When you first become a scientist it’s quite challenging to try and wrap your head around everything, but if you stick with your problems for long enough, like Einstein did, you get the hang of it. 😉
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Adelie Gorce answered on 5 Mar 2019:
I totally agree with Gabriel, I think that if you are very interested in a subject it will never look that difficult: most people find physics hard because they don’t like it at all, I have never! this does not mean I’ve always had the best grades in physics at school, but I did not mind working harder to learn more about it!
In the end, it really depends on what you like! -
Jose Angel Martinez-Gonzalez answered on 5 Mar 2019:
I totally agree with Gabriel and with Affelia. Everything depends on the person and the knowledge he/she has.
In my case, my training is in Physical Chemistry and I started with Quantum Chemistry, which to many of my career chemical colleagues seemed completely crazy …
However, I am amazed by the work of some friends who are a medical doctors (cardiologist and neurologist) and I think I would be unable to do it. -
Kathryn Boast answered on 5 Mar 2019:
I think different areas of science are complicated in different ways. Physics is quite complicated because there’s a lot of quite advanced maths. The problem with advanced maths is that you have to understand the simple maths first. I think that’s why it’s sometimes so hard to really understand some physics and maths, because if you don’t get the straightforward stuff at the beginning – maybe you miss a lesson, or the textbook doesn’t cover it in much detail, or maybe you skip that bit for some reason – then later on it can be really hard to understand the stuff that builds on the initial, basic stuff.
The other challenge for physics is that it often asks us to think about things that are brains weren’t built for – like four-dimensional things, or things being in two places at once, or things taking up space but having no size(?!?).
That said, physics is experiments are often less unpredictable than biology experiments – samples in physics don’t have minds of their own! Doing experiments in the real world is always going to be messy and a bit unpredictable – so find results in amongst the chaos sounds pretty complicated to me!
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