Lastly, grading is objective, not subjective.
Heh, it seems like it should be, doesn't it?
. While less is left up to interpretation than in English, eventually the "right answer" can become meaningless, and your workings are then subject to a biased assessment of how "good" they are.
Favourite subjects:
Highschool: Chemistry. (I had an awesome Chem teacher for 3 years in a row. He had a great sense of humour, and had strange talents like being able to multiply, (take the logarithm of to any base), take sine, cos, etc, of 14+ digit numbers together in his head, and have the answer in less than a second.
Undergrad: Math. After starting to concentrate in Chemistry, I realized that at the higher levels I would never be able to have a real understanding of what I was doing. They don't explain things at a fundamental level in high level chemistry, so what you learn is only 'useful' in really contrived situations. Math is very concrete and understandable at a basic level. I didn't feel like I was bumbling about and waving my hands around in math so much, and the math in university is all 'revolutionary' in the sense that it presents totally new ideas of how to look at things, which in effect, changes how you see the world around you (in ways you wouldn't expect). After taking a good math course, I felt like I had changed for the better (e.g. I was a more perceptive/intelligent person). After taking a chem course I felt like I knew more stuff.
Higher level: Theor. Physics.
I realize that math eventually becomes extremely pedantic. All the great mathematical pioneers (Newton, Gauss, etc..) were the far less formal than the mathematicians of today. Because mathematics has grown so much, it is hard to continue extending it. So, to keep busy, mathematicians of the 20th century decided that they would turn really anal and start formalizing everything to death. No intuition allowed. Common sense is shunned. Nothing is obvious. Progress is slow.
As the fields are today, theor. physicists are basically the same species of mathematicians that developed Calculus and geometry: they're concerned with making lots of progress and advancing science, at the expense of not being anal about every tiny little detail. A string theorist, for example, might create a bunch of new mathematics to describe his theory, and publish his work in a journal in 2 months. On the other hand, the greatest mathematician's achievement of the 20th century was proving Fermat's last theorem. It took about 80 years. Go look the theorem up and see how exciting it is <sarcasm>. Typically, a math paper takes at least 5 years to publish
.
IMO physics sucks until Lagrangian mechanics though. Circular motion, blocks sliding down hills, simple harmonic motion, springs = boring.
Btw, the most important mathematical development of the twentieth century, linear algebra (matrices, etc), was led by a physicist (Heisenberg), who just invented the field on the side while he was trying to describe what we now call "Quantum Mechanics"; his paper was titled "Matrix Mechanics."
That was long.
