Physics is the most fundamental science and for many students, the hardest of the three main sciences - physics, chemistry and biology. It is however the first actual science to be learnt in a practical sense. Babies don't learn about food or bowel movements. These things are instinctive and involuntary. They learn quickly however about the difference between hard and soft or light and dark.
Physics is the science that makes the most difference financially to a person's career. It has the most applications especially in engineering, design, and all areas of electronics and even areas like banking.
Learning physics requires the most insight and persistence to pick apart complex phenomena that are often consequences of the simplest laws. Physics is the most fundamental science in that every chemical law is a consequence of underlying physical laws, and every biological law is a consequence of underlying physical laws, and chemical laws, themselves a consequence of physical laws.
All of chemistry is a basic consequence of the forces between electrons in the outermost shells of atoms, the bonds that may be formed between them as they attempt to minimize the overall potential energy. Electrons, atoms, electron shells and atoms are all physical concepts. It is no coincidence that many chemistry Nobel prizes are actually won by physicists.
All of biology is at it's most basic a study of the struggle for survival and propagation of genes. The struggle for survival is a matter of being bigger, stronger, faster, better able to conserve energy, heat, water, or to withstand extreme pressure or heat. Genes are molecules, governed by chemical, hence physical laws, and all the other concepts are physical concepts.
Underlying much of physics are abstract structures of maths. Certainly it is the case that physics is summarised using maths, and predictions can only usefully be made using mathematical models. Most people won't know anything about group theory or complex numbers, but we couldn't model what happens in particle and quantum physics without these mathematical tools, and we wouldn't be able to draw conclusions about whether or not the result of an experiment was significant or not without knowing something about statistics and error analysis. A lot of physics can be done with quite basic maths - just substituting numbers into the right formula.
Physics is like a great unifying thing for a lot of questions that must be answered. Many religious beliefs are brought into question by the Big Bang - instead of having many religions you can have just one Bang. Physicists of different colours and ethnicities living under different ideologies all publish their results in a great free space and learn from each other. When scientists say they want to know the mind of God, it is not as chemists or biologists that they are speaking. It is as physicists.
On a more down to Earth note, physicists are fixers. When something is broke about the house - the fridge, TV, shelf...It is always a physical principle that is the reason, and you need more physics than biologist or chemist to fix it.