✒ talking to physicists at parties
“So, what do you do?”
“Me? I’m a physicist.”
“Hey, isn’t that a coincidence? I hated physics!”
“Really? Wow.”
“I was so terrible at it in school, and my teachers were simply awful. But you must be a genius!”
“Um... actually...”
“Oh, hi! Nice to meet you. A mathematician? I was so bad at math...”
That exact conversation is more common than you might think. I’m sure that lawyers get evil-lawyer jokes and accountants get some variant of, “Gee, that’s boring,” but physicists are told that their passion is dreadful in a way that’s supposed to be a compliment. It would be easy to slip into the conceit that what we’re doing is so esoteric and so painfully difficult that we are modern-day wizards, but that would be a lie.
Physics isn’t about out-of-this-world things like flux capacitors and trips across the eighth dimension: it’s as in-this-world as you can get. It’s a fascination with all the little things that our world does, such as ice crystals growing on a spider web on a signpost. (...)
From “Coffeshop Physics” by Jim Pivarski. Make sure to check out other of his brilliant posts, like “Leprechauns and laser beams” or the Physics in a Nutshell section.
