<p>"As a physicist, it is only with E & M that things get interesting - the concept of fields is fundamental to everything in physics that has been done in the last 100 years! Without understanding this stuff, you can have no comprehension of the physical sciences in the 20th century from relativity to quantum mechanics."</p>
<p>Yay!!! Absolutely true! One implies the other: this is the unity of physics. There is even a lecture where the Indian Institute of Technology professor shows that Magnetism is a direct result of Relativity and Coulomb's law. Anyone studying E&M should check that out. It's on youtube: just type magnetism lecture (I think it's lecture #18).</p>
<p>"She went on to say to her simpleton dad that she liked density and pressure and things like that (used blood flow in her example that I can't quote) but that some other areas just aren't her thing."</p>
<p>Wow, that's weird. Fluid mechanics, chaos theory... uses very complex math, to the point when you can even lose the concept lying behind your calculations.</p>
<p>With E&M, it's different: the systems studied are usually so elegantly perfect that the mathematics don't make you lose track of the concepts behind.</p>
<p>"chemistry and biology relevant parts of physics but not the out there stuff"</p>
<p>By the stuff "out there," I would interpret it as relativity etc... Well if she likes math, she should try to mathematically reason WHY people would have modified their equations with nonintuitive proportions (by that, I mean v2/c2). It's algebraically provable (with precalculus). It can rapidly become intuitive. </p>
<p>Hint: a starting point would be the absolute speed of light, as derived by Maxwell. Sry for the double post.</p>
<p>For me Physics was the worst because I just didn't care. With Biology, Chem, OChem, and even calculus I was at least semi-interested. Making myself sit through those boring classes was like torture.</p>
<p>lol but no really it's more of a hard mathematical science as opposed to biology which is not very related to mathematics. i mean the whole core of physics is centered around mathematical computations and calculus.</p>
<p>I'm currently taking physics II (studying for my final- in fact), and I actually like the second semester physics A LOT more than first semester. A lot of students either prefer the first semester or the second semester, for very different reasons. The majority (I didn't do any statistical test on this assumption) like the first semester more because it's easier to visualize, and it's things you "deal with" every day- for example, gravity, or the motion of a ball tossed in the air. But second semester physics is not something you "see", per se, every day. I mean I don't know about other students, but I don't walk out into the street and think to myself "Gee, I'm walking into a magnetic field of 1T, but my friend is probably seeing it as an electric field!" So maybe your D falls into the group of students who like first semester physics more. Also, physics isn't just "math" in the sense that calculus is. In calc, you have a problem...you solve it...pretty straight forward (usually). In physics, not only do you have to know the math (which is the easy part) you have to UNDERSTAND HOW to apply the math. So just learning a formula isn't going to help you, but students have to learn what that formula means and when is it relevant. But for some reason, I still like physics II more...maybe because my mind is just wired to like abstract concepts, but I think the topics of phys II is a lot cooler.</p>