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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!

> 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.

> the focus ends up on execution rather than the why

Exactly right. School teaches you that the point of running an experiment is to try and get the same result as the teacher, while performing a ritual with steps called "hypothesis" and "method".

Really a shame because understanding why your results were incorrect is much more important than stumbling on the right answer by accident.

I would say this is fine for lab work as part of a course. The majority of people have never worked in a laboratory environment before, beside what their school could offer. Precision balances, calipers/micrometers, electronic measuring equipment, fume hoods, etc. Especially chem and bio where you start working with more dangerous reagents and very specialized instruments. Were you able to follow instructions to get the experiment to work? Did you correctly apply what you know about experimental error to get sensible results? Were you able to actually get those steps done in the few hours a week you had? Did you write it up legibly and keep good notes?

"Labs" are not research projects. Those come later and are usually also heavily guided. As a mentor you do not want to set a stupid-hard undergraduate project that might not work, unless you really discuss it with the student. It's demoralizing and the majority of the student population only needs to show that they did some original thinking, tried out some hypothises and wrote up the results in a coherent way. Good schools offer extra-curricular/summer programs to push motivated students that are considering research careers.

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.