#its truly just like a rough learning curve at first adjusting to the class compared to previous science classes

[oflgtfol]

quastion. if you were a high schooler looking to take the least stressful lab science would you taking physics or chemistry

i think this is a simpler question of which do you enjoy more? for me i would choose physics over chemistry any day but that’s because i hate chemistry and so all chem labs i took were boring and stressful, and i love physics so the labs were fun and interesting

however if both subjects are equally uninteresting to you, then i do recommend physics! maybe i'm biased, but i think even personal interest aside, my high school chem labs were definitely more involved and complicated than my high school physics labs. physics experiments in lower level classes such as high school (and even introductory college physics to some extent) are pretty simple to set up and conduct, the main understanding comes from doing the math afterwards to get any sort of result out of it, whereas chem was more like, actually mixing stuff and then observing

not only were physics labs easier, simpler, and more engaging, but each lab also was unique and distinct from each other. i really can only recall the same basic setup of like, mixing stuff together as the idea behind every single chem lab i did. the exact way you mixed them together differed of course but that was the main idea

meanwhile some examples of physics labs i recall from high school include:

projectile motion: most likely you will roll a marble down a ramp off the edge of the lab table, measure the horizontal and vertical distances it traveled, maybe time it also or use a photogate to measure the velocity, or something, and then use the kinematic equations to find any missing variables, and then through all that you will probably be to told to find the value of g, what is known as the acceleration due to gravity, aka the rate at which things fall.

circular motion: you may be using a FLYING PIG to demonstrate circular motion!!! figuring out the tension in the string, the idea of centripetal force, centripetal acceleration, rates of revolution, etc.

harmonic motion: push some slinkies around, demonstrate hooke's law and spring force, calculation of frequency and oscillation, maybe observing resonant frequencies and resonant modes

standing waves: using some sort of low tech version of a standing wave generator to observe, well, standing waves. the high school version of this lab i believe was very surface level and was mostly just drawing how different standing waves looked, counting the nodes and antinodes, and predicting it for different frequencies. i think the teacher even got us a giant rope and we had to recreate the lower frequency standing waves together as a class by just oscillating it ourselves

all around, in my experience at least, high school physics labs are so much more involved and engaging than chem ever was. and while the math involved in the physics class was more daunting than chem, it was such a fun and interactive class. and again i may be biased but i think, if both chem and physics are uninteresting to you but you need to choose one anyway, i think having a basic background in physics is a lot more useful and goes a lot further than a basic background in chem does. i truly believe that knowing stuff about the kinematic equations, circular motion, free body diagrams, harmonic motion, etc etc will enrich your life further and change the way you see the world around you. high school physics will not make you an expert but it can certainly make observing patterns in life and how the natural world operates a lot more fun and exciting