Through Arts & Letters Daily, I ran across an interesting article on physics. Well, as interesting as any article on physics can be. Apprently the entire field is in a serious decline. That doesn't surprise me too much. My present and former roommates and an ex-girlfriend (of sorts) are all people who started out majoring in physics and then moved on to something else. Being the intrepid reporter I'm not really, I decided to ask them why they dropped it. Here are their responses:

"I used to (and still do) enjoy physics and thought it was a lot of fun. The professors took away all the fun.

They were boring and didn't teach. They expected you to come to class knowing everything already. I really just wasn't having fun anymore. They did not motivate me and I heard the same thing from a lot of guys I knew who stayed in the field."

-Former roommate Adam, who went on to get a degree in MIS and now works in the IT field

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The main reason I quit physics was that I decided that it just wasn't worth it anymore. The more physics classes I took, the farther away from conceptual of theoretical physics the classes got. The classes were increasingly more geared to experimentation (when the weren't written specifically for engineering majors - which was even worse). While it was still possible to derive the theoretical constructs from the courses, it just wasn't worth it any more.

The class the finally made the decision for me was Advanced Physics Lab, which was a year-long rehash of physics experiments a century or more old. Not only was it entirely boring, and completely worthless from the theoretical standpoint, it wasn't even a very good course from the experimental standpoint, since it didn't teach you how to create your own experiments, only how to run ones somebody else created for you. On top of that, the overriding concern of the course was error analysis, which, while important, is not worth a year of laboratory to perform - not too mention that the math involved is incredibly dreary.

So, at that point, I finally decided that I hated physics classes more than I loved physics. Since I wanted to be a writer anyway, the obvious solution was that it was time to change majors.

-Current roommate Danforth, who is also presently working in the IT field.

The ex-girlfriend is, and forever will be, unavailable for comment. She didn't last as long in the program as Adam and Jason did and is currently a fine arts major.

I know enough about physics to know that I'd never want to major in it. That whole gravity thing has been haunting me since I was a clutzy teenager.