alt Hacker NewsPhysics was like that as well, and from my limited experience chemistry too.
The history of physics and the theory of it is great. A Brief History of Time is an awesome read.
Studying physics is not like that. Studying formulas, applying them to situations, and of course very math heavy.
One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Just following instructions and sometimes they didn’t work out and no one knew why. I never learned the most important thing: how to design an experiment. Following a long recipe then reading the result is much less useful than observing a thing, forming a testable, falsifiable hypothesis about that thing, and then testing it.
Last thing I’ll say is you probably aren’t going to get the “wonder” of science from a science class. Those classes are there to tell you the answers, but the most interesting part is discovering the answers yourself which is not possible in a one semester survey course.
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As a physics major I agree a lot with this.
Most of my courses were very "Point A" to "Point B". You're given a set of formulae, then a problem, then you use some combinations of those formulae to solve the problem. Most labs were the same way: you're given an exact script to follow without any explanation of the experiment design. It felt like both were optimized for easy instruction / grading and not for learning new skills or concepts.
Only two of the courses I took were substantially different. One was an upper division lab that actually was more open-ended, where we were given a goal and some equipment and had to figure out how to use the equipment to meet the goal. Another was a more conceptual course where we explored how to approach broad problems to come up with rough estimates for a wide variety of questions. Both were much more engaging, but I saw many students good at the typical course type struggle with how open ended these courses were.
> One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur.
Well, a lot of places would penalize you if your data is incorrect, so most of the focus ends up on execution rather than the why. If you were angling for a high GPA for whatever reason, you cannot afford to experiment too much during lab work. It's another case entirely of course if you are conducting research.
Compared to some other books on the same topic, A Brief History of Time is a poor book. It just happened to be the first popular book on the topic.
Fully agree with labs (not just science but engineering as well). 2 years into my grad program, I visited my undergrad campus and a professor asked for feedback on the education I received. I told him that all the labs need to be revamped. As taught, they were a waste of time. Virtually every lab I did went like this: "Design a circuit (e.g. amplifier) with the following characteristics. Then build it and confirm via measurements."
The challenging part was the design, which was all theoretical. It was then trivial to wire it up.
I recall one time I was given a project to build some circuit. I built it, but when the professor evaluated it, he saw the output was very fuzzy. He wanted to know if it was due to my circuit or whether the input was fuzzy. He did a bunch of interesting things on the oscilloscope to determine that it was indeed the input. Now that's the sort of stuff they should have taught us!
As for motivation for subjects like physics/other sciences. It's a challenge. As I said in a different comment, there often just isn't enough time to teach both. I think professors expect students to have some level of intrinsic motivation already. For something like physics, you really cannot reduce the math involved - most undergrad physics curricula have too little math as it is!