How do you feel about physics?

And I do mean this in a very literal sense: what are the primary feelings that come to mind when you hear the word, “physics”?

I ask my students this question on the first day of class, using pictures of my dog, Cheyenne (who, by the way, will make frequent appearances on this blog):

Physics makes me feel like:

Which one represents you?

I would love it of course if everyone identified with Joyful Cheyenne, but I understand that many more people identify with I-Just-Want-To-Hide Cheyenne. This brings me a certain amount of sadness, since I think physics is pretty darn cool, and I want other people to think so too. But as I tell my students, I’ll settle for people feeling like Neutral Cheyenne. Not loving physics, but not hating it either; perhaps appreciative of what it is and what it’s allowed us to accomplish technologically.

I think it’s important to do this check-in when you’re learning anything new, since your emotions will have an impact on your learning, but it is especially true in physics since so many people have a negative opinion of it before they’ve even learned it – and this negativity in itself makes it harder to learn physics.

So, if you love physics already, awesome! But if you’re a bit intimidated, that’s ok too. I recommend practicing setting aside your anxiety, letting it hang out in the background of your thoughts. It’s rather like listening to a radio while you study: you can either give the radio your FULL ATTENTION, or you can let it run in the background while you pay attention to the task at hand.

Finally, in starting out, I want to remind you that you are not dumb or stupid or incapable (or any other degrading notion) when it comes to physics. Physics is a challenge – if it was easy, it wouldn’t have taken literal millenia for humanity to establish it as a science. (Since Newton’s Laws are so foundational to physics, we generally think of the modern era as starting with him in the late 1600s. In all of human history, we’ve only really had physics for about 330 years!) But challenges can be overcome with time and effort, which means with time and effort, you too can learn physics.