Last year, a girl in my school asked me why I liked physics, and I couldn't tell her a reason other than 'I just do' or 'I find it really interesting'. Like sure, those are true, but I find many things interesting so it hardly explains this drive that seems to only be getting stronger as I learn more and more about it.
A year was a while ago, but I guess my subconscious may have been wondering about it ever since then, because a few days ago I realised the answer.
I'm using physics to try and work out the world. It's like every new thing I learn adds a new piece to the puzzle that I never thought existed, and it broadens my view of the world in ways I didn't know were possible. It's about knowing exactly where you are in the world, and how everything around you works at the most fundamental level. Like, I now know now the basics of how car gears work, which cleared up a lot of worries about me destroying the car if I do this or that while changing gears.
But when I talk about broadening my view of the world, I don't mean just basic things like knowing how things work, although that's useful enough. When I learn a bit of relativity it was extremely hard to understand. Not the maths, the maths was easy, but the meaning of the things the maths was saying. How is it possible for the time to be different depending on how fast something is going compared to the speed of light? Or that the length of something contracts as it goes faster (measuring in the reference frame that is at rest)? Like, it quite literally gets shorter. At least according to the theory (which is well proven). I'm still not sure if I believe it.
The thing that I'm currently (since 2010) fascinated by quantum physics. It's probably because I don't understand it in the slightest. Quantum physics is complex and confusing, and I'm yet to formally study it. Physics goes weird when it goes quantum, and it's going to be really interesting to see how what I learn about quantum physics will fit in with how I view the world at the moment.
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