Bait and Switch, and observation from Entropy Bound. Peter’s argument is in the context of “the lab” being more mysterious when you don’t know what’s going on (the bait) but by the time you get to work in one you’re doing actual science which is (one hopes) quite interesting, even if the apparati have lost their mystique.
But when you get down to it, it’s a bait-and-switch: when you are growing up, no-one ever tells you that things aren’t so colorful and mysterious, so by the time you finally realize that it’s not, you’ve found a much more interesting — albeit prosaic –real world to ponder.
I can certainly identify with this, and also see a related effect along another tangent: are we using the right bait? You take physics classes (and this probably holds true for other disciplines, though I have little empirical data for comparison) and there is this sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken promise of “I know this is basic stuff and may seem boring, but I promise if you learn this, we’ll get to some interesting stuff later on.” Whether that holds true or not depends on what you’re doing, who’s teaching and what your threshold of “interesting” is. I now wonder if this is part of the hurdle to get more students interested in physics — do we bore them to death learning basic kinematics, thermodynamics and E&M? Does this drive some students away who might otherwise be interested if they were doing physics discovered after 1900? At least in biology there is the prospect of dissecting something even in introductory courses (which is why I shied away from biology. Dissection, moi? Not only no, but fuck no). In chemistry you play with chemicals. In physics we’re sliding blocks down an incline. (My undergraduate experience did have one bonus, though. Since we were a small school and could only support one sequence per year in general physics, it was designated a sophomore-level course, so that everyone taking it could have calculus as a pre- or co-requisite. In order to make sure they physics majors had something to do, we had a course in basic optics and relativity and another in electronics that were engaging, but then anyone following the normal sequence regressed to the yawn-fest)
