Like a lot of physics majors, my pipeline started on YouTube. I spent my high school years binge-watching Veritasium and Vsauce, getting absolutely captivated by the sexy, mind-bending concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Fast forward to my junior year of college. I still love those concepts, and I’d like to think I’m fairly educated on them now, but actually being in university made me realize something painful: there are levels to this shit. To actually make a name for yourself in theoretical physics, you can’t just be smart but you have to be brilliant. My math is decent, but I quickly realized I am pretty inept when it comes to the deep, grueling mathematical physics required to push the theoretical boundaries of our universe. It also really doesn't help that theoretical physics generally does not pay well unless you are literally the absolute greatest in your field.
But here’s the rant/happy ending: somehow, amidst getting humbled by theory, I accidentally grew a massive love for experimentation.
There is genuinely no better feeling on earth than crunching the theoretical predictions and then watching them actually occur right in front of you in your own experiment. I’m currently studying semiconductors, and I’ve developed a deep, borderline obsessive fondness for producing samples and testing its physical properties.
It gave me a place to belong in this major. I might not be the next Roger Penrose, but I completely compensate for my lack of god-tier math with my experimental techniques.
I just love how much skill expression there is in experimental physics. It genuinely makes you feel like an artisan. Obviously, the theoretical background is important, but out in the lab, it’s the subtle steps, the physical intuition, and the tiny changes in your technique that make or break your experiment. It's an art form, and I love it.
Just wanted to get that off my chest. Anyone else go through that pipeline?
TL;DR: Got into physics because of pop-sci videos about quantum mechanics. Realized in college that I'm not a generational math genius and theoretical physics doesn't pay anyway. Fell in love with making experiments in the lab instead.