She didn't understand physics. Yeah, her and nearly every other teenage physicist I ever knew, certainly including myself. ;) My experience of physics is that

She didn't understand physics. Yeah, her and nearly every other teenage physicist I ever knew, certainly including myself. ;) My experience of physics is that it takes time on the order of a decade to learn, mostly because you have to approach it from so many different directions before you finally grasp it. I'm not sure it matters which angle of attack you pursue first, provided you can remain interested enough to eventually come back from a different angle. There were bits of physics that I could handle algebraically but which I didn't intuitively understand, and there were bits that I intuitively understood but where I didn't have the formalism so I would kind of flail around. And the knowledge of the landscape, of how a particular problem fits into the universe of known problems, is yet another level.