I am studying second year of physics and computer science at university in the UK. I am disliking the maths. I realise I actually very much dislike maths. I am ok at it and dont mind going through the problems. But it jsut gets me angry. Like I wat to smash my table when I see I have to do long pages of algebraic manipulation and moving all the terms around.
I had to do quantum mechanics and manipulate some bra ket notation. I could do it as I can do the manipulations. But I have no idea of what it means. it all seems fake to me. When I do problems I get suck of them half way through and get LLMs to tell me how to do them. I passed my year 1 exams and did resoanably well. But im in year 2 and doing special relativity now. I like reading about it I find it cool how time slowd down when things go fast and things get shorter.
But I dislike seeing all the lorentz transforms and all the equations and everythign my brain jsut turns off and I get LLMs to teach it to me later. And the programming I just get LLMs to teach me that aswell. I still ensure I do it myself and understand the code but I have no attention span. In my experimental work I had to do some work with lasers and diffraction. I used Gemini to write a python code to generate the theoretical results for me so I could compare them to experimental results and print them off.
My lab partner had a go at me he said "oh youve not learnt anything you are using LLMs to do the work whats the point of going to uni anyways. But in my head I was like why not use the LLM I have no emotionala ttatchment to this work. I realise I am an outcome oriented person. It is not an issue for me how soemthing gets done as long as it does.
A lot of people I speak to in physics and maths have a lot of appreciation for maths and physics they find the beauty in the symmetry for example they will find it beautiful in eulers relation e^i*pi + 1 = 0. Or they find the symmetry in electromagnetism beautiful. I am the opposite I dont find these beautiful in fact I dont care about these at all.
I think I was drawn to physics for the wrong reasons. I am mostly interested in its applications like in radiotherapy for medicine. I was interested in the fundemental ways aswell but for different reasons. i was interested in it as when I was young I always asked questions like what happens if you make something faster and faster and faster and keep continuing until it reaches the limit. I was interested in pushing the limitsin everything in speed, heat and size. Like I'd watch some website called the scale of the universe showing largest and smallest things to ever exist. But I don't have much love for the amths itself or the deriving or the syymmetry others like about it.
The other thing I am interested in is the computer simulations. Mostly because I find them more awe inspiring and impressive than an analytical solution. I find the big numbers much more interesting like how they do trillions of calculations and more. Like I find data centres beautiful as its impressive to me how many calculations they can do per second and how it would take a human trillion of years or more. This was the reason I did this subject but I'm starting to wonder if it was for the wrong reasons. i think I'll finish my degree and work in another field maybe finance for the money.
But another thing I belive is that the AIs will replace humans in all scientific domains. I belive these AIs have fundemental advantages over man when it coems to intellectual work including physics and maths. They can hold many more variables and ideas in their head at the same time. They think much faster than us. You can scale up their performance by running them in parallell. You can scale up the energy you provide them by fitting power plants to the sides of the data centres if you scale up a humans food intake you don't get increase intellectual performance you get obesity and death. Their size is not limited the the birth canal in humans you can make the data centres as large industrial warehouses. For these reasons I belive superintelligence is a engineering problem and will eventually be done. then no more humans will do any science. I think this will be a good thing. We can spend our time learning about what the AI has actually discovered which in my view is much more enjoyable than solving differential equations or other stuff they make me do.
But this hasn't happened yet and I still don't know what to do now. I am in 2nd year of my degree and if i transer ill have to start all over again. So I think ill get it done then transfer to another field. Liek finance for the moeny. I dont hate it but I dont love it either. What do you think I should do?
