Why you can't learn physics

I believe that, more so than most branches of science, people have problems with physics. I see it every time I tell people I have a degree in physics when they ooh and aah at my clearly superior intellect. For some reason, the world seems to believe that physics is Hard. I don't fully understand this, but while I was browsing at Barnes and Noble I found a book that demonstrates an interesting point.

A series of books are available at your local book store (unless you live in St. George where all book stores suck) titled "[Science] Demystified". I saw "Physics Demystified" as well as "Biology Demystified" and "Calculus Demystified" today. I fully support the idea that any of these topics can baffling. What concerned me, however, was something that was written on the cover of "Physics Demystified". It's one of those things like "474 full color images" or whatever they say to convince you that the book will be easy to understand and interesting. Their most important selling point that they wanted to get across to the world about their book was: "LOTS of illustrations to relate PHYSICS to the REAL WORLD".

And that, right there, is why people don't understand physics. Because they don't know what physics even is. It would be like making "Auto Repair Demystified" and claiming that it has "LOTS of illustrations to relate AUTO REPAIR to FIXING CARS". Physics is nothing more than a quantitative description of the real world. You don't need to relate it to the real world. It is the real world. Physics is about describing how things happen. You throw a ball up, it comes back down. (Unless you can throw it up at 11km/s.) Can anyone tell me how throwing a ball up relates to real life?