There's a key
difference between physics and engineering, as I have learned:
In engineering, everything is very black-and-white. Either your answers are
right, or they're wrong. Engineers have to be so sure of themselves in order to
graduate, that by senior year they're the most closed minded of all people on
campus. They can still be nice people, but don't be surprised if their attitude
toward you is "Either you're smart, or you're not. Either you're a friend,
or you're an enemy. Either you have a degree, or you don't. Period." A
typical engineering professor doesn't care how much or little work his students
put into the homework or show on the page; the bottom line is all that matters.
However cold that may seem, it actually has a good purpose: when an engineer
designs a bridge, you want to be very, very sure that the bridge won't
collapse. Hence it's good to be sure of what you're doing in that line of work.
But then there are physics majors... like me. And there is a good reason why
physics majors don't build bridges: they'd probably collapse. Physics deals
with the theoretical, the unknown workings of the universe. These things are so
complicated, that instead of dealing with numbers directly, physicists deal
with symbols and observational theory.
True story: My current physics professor came into class yesterday and started
working an example problem on the board. He used symbols entirely; no numbers
(except as powers or coefficients), just Greek letters and fraction bars. To
make things more complicated, he did the problem via a longer route than
necessary, deriving all the formulas he could have just recited as shortcuts in
the meantime. Everybody in the class was spellbound. I was amazed I actually
understood some of it (key word: some).
But THEN, the prof got to the part where he had the final equation in terms of
symbols. This was when he was supposed to plug in the numbers the symbols
represented, and solve from there. I quote:
"Well, let's see: this number's something to the tenth... whatever the
coefficient is, it's not terribly important... then we have a ten to the
fourteenth over a ten to the thirteenth... just call that a ten overall. Then
there's a nine over a ten here... we'll say they almost cancel to one, so just
drop them both, and then you get some answer between five and fifty-two
centimeters. Or less or more. It doesn't really matter. Just know that this is
how you get to this point, and put the numbers into the calculator, and you'll
be fine."
Engineers generally go on to work desk jobs planning bridges, corporate
inventory, etc. Physicists, on the other hand, usually go into the military and
design laser-guided weapons.
Makes ya feel real good about our American military superiority, don't it?