Secondly, some of us were quite happy to take chem, psych and biology all throughout our high school years, but dropped physics like a hot potato once the exam questions just stared being applied scientific maths and stopped actually being about how things worked.
I suck at math. (This is, after all, why I teach English.)
But, even though I cannot begin to do the math behind it, I do understand the concepts behind things like the Grand Unification Theory and wormholes and cosmic strings and why, if they really had detected particles moving faster than the speed of light, it would have required a brand new set of equations for just about everything we do.
None of which is terribly important, really.
Yet I still think basic physics should and can be taught without having to resort to the kind of math that makes student's eyes glaze over, so that the average person has at least a basic grasp of the fundamentals. Which so few people do.
The conversation this morning on gravity was honestly far more in the ballpark than it probably would have been down at the local coffee shop (even assuming I lived in a town that had one), and that's the bit in the whole thing that was, all kidding aside, terribly depressing.
The fundamentals, not just in physics but in all the rest of the sciences - and 9/10ths of subjects - just seem to be sorely lacking, is all.
Either that I am getting incredibly old and jaded and cynical. More so than I used to be, anyway.