In my experience, it’s actually the other way around: physicists can think in terms of equations, without having to visualize them. I generally can’t do that myself - I would get frustrated at talks where the presenter just had slide after slide of equations but some people could read those slides the way I read ordinary English text.
Visualizing for me breaks down as soon as we get smaller than grains of sand. And even grains of sand have some really weird and freaky effects that my brain just won’t process well.
In my experience, it’s actually the other way around: physicists can think in terms of equations, without having to visualize them. I generally can’t do that myself - I would get frustrated at talks where the presenter just had slide after slide of equations but some people could read those slides the way I read ordinary English text.
Visualizing for me breaks down as soon as we get smaller than grains of sand. And even grains of sand have some really weird and freaky effects that my brain just won’t process well.