To start with I liked the idea of chemistry from a young age, which acted as a seed for me to think anything about chemistry was interesting and worthy of learning in school.
Chemistry is about materials and processes which are things that I like and are what are taught in school, but it’s also about the practical applications and I love learning about those. For example, there is Nitrogen with it’s property of occurring naturally as a triple-bonded diatomic molecule with itself, and that that bond with itself is quite strong (compared to oxygen which readily combusts or the halogens which really don’t want to stay together.) To tie this property into a practical idea, we can think of the Haber-Borsch process to produce ammonia (NH3) from Nitrogen (N2) and Hydrogen (H2) gas. While ammonia is thermodynamically favorable to form, it takes a large amount of energy and a catalyst to break the Nitrogen’s bond in order for the reaction to proceed, thus it’s a very energy intensive process that uses 2% of humanity’s global energy consumption.
So, I suppose what I like about it is the constellation of properties, processes, things, and ideas that interconnect and make you think about how you might use them together to accomplish something.
It’s physics that I didn’t like as much. It’s still interesting and there’s a lot of overlap, but I hated memorizing formulas and like yeah it’s good to know principles like the conservation of angular momentum but do I really care to hold all the associated formulas in my head? Motion is also just less interesting to me than transformation idk it seems like a bit of a personality test.
Why do you actually hate chemistry? What do you actually like?
Chemistry follows mathematical principles too, but it’s statistics and probability rather than desecrate math. The discrete parts of chemistry are observational, and then the rules are made to describe a trend. Much like a linear regression trend line, the rules don’t perfectly describe every situation, but that’s what makes chemistry so fun- you can make anything can happen with enough effort. It’s more exciting than physics where it’s like “This is the Carnot engine cycle- it’s cool but this is the most efficient engine cycle there will ever be.” Maybe the fun in physics starts with the unsolved problems? I think it really is a personality test in the end.
I learned thermodynamics with chemistry even though it’s basically physics, but I liked that. Thinking of thermodynamics as a statistical distribution, and entropy as a system moving towards more statistically likely states was helpful and intuitive to me. The actual physics classes I took were classical physics.
I was very pleased with using infinite rectangles to calculate the area under a curve when learning limits and integrals, so I also understand the appeal of pure math.
Biology is fun as well, and it has a bit of everything doesn’t it? I liked taxonomy, but there wasn’t anything in biology that was very moving to me even if there were lots of interesting things.
I also like economics, which is mathematical certainly even worse for being chaotic. Nothing more random than human behavior.
No offense taken, but also skill issue if it doesn’t make sense? I sucked at physics and it was certainly a skill issue.