[doctorwho42]

Physics course is set to do two things

(1) 'to teach you to think like a physicist' as my professor was fond of saying to us. No one is going to be able to learn all of the subjects knowledge in 4 years, let alone a complex and rigorous field like physics.

(2) to give you a core foundation of understanding on which all other physics is built upon.

By teaching the core subjects and lessons of physics, you can get a pretty good understanding of the world, how it works, and how to derive equations to explain it.

As for it not being able to learn enough to do anything real. I beg to differ, like all fields you tend to learn the most in 'the field'. Most physicists learn by doing just like any other field. Take for instance engineering, there are some exceptions but most of the engineers I have known in my life have really only become fully viewed as engineers once they had some years of experience under their belts... Same thing goes for comp sci, and same goes for physics.

It's hard to explain because the field is viewed as an abstraction to those outside of it. The goal of understanding something new, discovering some new phenomenon, or better understanding an old one. But what that looks like in practice is years of working in a lab failing, trying things, taking results, tilting your head and going 'thats weird', and charting to colleagues about how to get something to work. Those who have done experimental physics, this is just experimentation and it makes sense, those who haven't, this probably sound simplistic and it is. Like your own fields, it's hard to really capture the depth of what experimentation looks like because even in physics it varies from sub field to sub field.

So it goes, sorry for the rambling from an experimental physicist

[javajosh]

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think maybe my objection to MY curriculum was being handed a lot of mathematical tools which I didn't need, and so it was impossible for me to "slot them in" to my toolbox. Most named solutions to differential equations were just like...why? (e.g. Bessel functions, or Green's function or...). I think it's a failure of pedagogy - I personally think you should give students the problem before giving them the solution. But the physics curriculum seems to want to give you solutions first and then tell you how you can use them. My brain doesn't work that way; tools fulfill a need. It would be like teaching a carpenter all the ins and outs of every tool in the shop, without ever building anything. How is the student supposed to organize that knowledge? Alphabetically?

I suspect that, just like how algorithms rarely pop up in software practice, so too do these kinds of tools pop up in physics practice, and when they do you probably get that same happy jolt of "Hey I finally get to apply this knowledge!" And that happens about once every 2 years.