Yeah, I also seem to have a knack for that (as good as anyone in my cohort at a top physics grad school, I have reason to believe), but I have no idea if I got it / developed it by doing lots of physics, or if I would have had it anyway. It’s hard to judge the counterfactual!
Hmm, I do vaguely remember, in early college, going from a place where I couldn’t reliably construct my own differential-type arguments in arbitrary domains (“if we increase the charge on the plate by dQ …” blah blah, wam bam, and now we have a differential equation), to where I could easily do so. Maybe that’s weak evidence that I got something generalizable out of physics?
Yeah, I also seem to have a knack for that (as good as anyone in my cohort at a top physics grad school, I have reason to believe), but I have no idea if I got it / developed it by doing lots of physics, or if I would have had it anyway. It’s hard to judge the counterfactual!
Hmm, I do vaguely remember, in early college, going from a place where I couldn’t reliably construct my own differential-type arguments in arbitrary domains (“if we increase the charge on the plate by dQ …” blah blah, wam bam, and now we have a differential equation), to where I could easily do so. Maybe that’s weak evidence that I got something generalizable out of physics?