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Asked by anon-252499 on 30 Apr 2020.
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Rosie Hayward answered on 30 Apr 2020:
I wasn’t really interested in physics at school. I was encouraged to take a science at college, and just happened to choose physics. I ended up enjoying it, and started watching documentaries and reading popular science books. I remember time dilation, where observers moving at different speeds will experience time differently, was the first thing which really fascinated me.
Unfortunately my teachers were not encouraging, and on my report they wrote that I lacked the mathematical ability to study physics. I was heartbroken, and confused as I was doing so well in maths that the college asked me to also take further maths even though we were already half way through the school year. I went to my form tutor, Fran, who taught music, to ask her about the report. She said she would talk to my physics teachers about it, but when she came back she was really angry. She told me to ignore my teachers, and if I wanted to be a physicist, I should be a physicist and prove them wrong.
I suspect my teachers had no good reason why I shouldn’t pursue physics, especially since I overheard one of them once saying that women don’t succeed in physics because they get distracted by babies…
I did ignore them, and listened to Fran. I got into my university of choice, I am now in the final year of my PhD in theoretical physics, and I have loved physics ever since.
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Anne Green answered on 30 Apr 2020:
At school I enjoyed, and was good at, maths. But I wanted to use maths to solve interesting problems, rather than just doing it for the sake of it. I must admit that I didn’t find physics at school particularly interesting. However I discovered cosmology via popular science books and television programs. The idea that we could understand what the Universe is made of and what happened during its first few minutes really appealed to me.
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Miriam Hogg answered on 1 May 2020:
I think a combination of things got me interesting in astrophysics. When I was younger my dad used to get the New scientist magazine which he would let me read and he would explain some of the harder topics to me. I also got a chance to do a GCSE in astronomy at school which I really enjoyed.
I actually intially wanted to study galaxies (specifically why some have spirals and others don’t), but when it came time to apply for PhD’s I looked mainly at exoplanets because they looked really interesting. I ended up taking a PhD position which was about exoplanets and older, dying or dead stars called white dwarfs. I ended up prefering the white dwarf aspect rather than the exoplanet side and moved my research towards dead stars instead! So really my interest has switched between fields as i’ve done research.
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Megan Maunder answered on 5 May 2020:
I enjoyed and was quite good at maths at school so I decided to study it at university. In my second year of my undergraduate (or first) degree I was struggling with some of the pure maths concepts and my tutor told me I could change to pursue a mainly applied maths degree, “MSci Mathematics (Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics)” to be precise. I really liked fluid dynamics and this suited me. I then had to choose a research topic for my final year project and met my current supervisor. The idea that space had weather fascinated me and the idea that the Sun had such a big effect on Earth and causes the Northern Lights had me hooked!
Comments
Kerrianne commented on :
I did a masters project in Brazil, and I loved playing with the high powered lasers. Working in a dark room, moving optics around, trying to study something and find cohesive answers was really fun. I found I really looked forward to waking up and going to the lab every day. So after I finished my undergraduate, this was the kind of field I was interested in joining.
olegshebanits commented on :
I have been fascinated from day one of physics class. A way to explain how everything works, sold!
Chemistry and biology was great too, but not to such extent. I can’t say if I like physics more because I connected with physics teachers more, or if I just liked physics itself more – but the teachers do have a huge influence.
At one point I almost switched to math though. In uni when I was doing a prep year before my MSc we had this amazing math teacher. He would write up some theorem or solve some neat example where you get a clean answer in the end (like, 1) and just stand there and say “Isn’t this just beautiful?” – and I knew just what he meant.
So I’d say this feeling is what kept me in physics all these years – it is beautiful.
And as you “zoom in” on the fine details, at some level biology and chemistry overlap so much with physics (and each other) they basically blend into one and the same.