Freshman Advanced Physics
After a little bit of a silence blogging is back in style in Rigoland.
While reading Smolin's book I stumbled upon the passage in which he talks about how physics students are discouraged by the lack of interesting subjects early on and how at his school they had quantum physics as a freshman class. Smolin makes a good point that most of what is taught in our freshman classes is usually what students have seen in high school and it seems very boring. It is boring on two accounts: The subjects are never "cool" ones such as black holes, quantum physics, cosmology, etc. Secondly, the subjects are never too technical. For example, a rigorous treatment of Newtonian mechanics could be done at a freshman level (not boring), but students are made to solve inclined-plane problems instead (boring).
One thing that I think that is crucial to the overdue scientific revolution Smolin talks about in his book is a revision of how we teach physics at the undergraduate level. Not only in what we teach but in how we do it. In my experience, and I think that this is true for most of my peers trained in US institutions, the way we were taught was as if we weren't ready to learn. The overall attitude being we'll tell you in grad school. This has been doubly frustrating now after encountering the attitude of you should have learned all this in undergrad. I can understand where this comes from: physics requires quite a bit of math. However, me and I think my peers also wish more math had been taught math by the physicists.
Smolin's book never talks about the possible inadequacies of undergrad education (perhaps for good reason), which was a bit disappointing for me. Maybe it will get me to finish the essay I've been writing about this subject some day...
While reading Smolin's book I stumbled upon the passage in which he talks about how physics students are discouraged by the lack of interesting subjects early on and how at his school they had quantum physics as a freshman class. Smolin makes a good point that most of what is taught in our freshman classes is usually what students have seen in high school and it seems very boring. It is boring on two accounts: The subjects are never "cool" ones such as black holes, quantum physics, cosmology, etc. Secondly, the subjects are never too technical. For example, a rigorous treatment of Newtonian mechanics could be done at a freshman level (not boring), but students are made to solve inclined-plane problems instead (boring).
One thing that I think that is crucial to the overdue scientific revolution Smolin talks about in his book is a revision of how we teach physics at the undergraduate level. Not only in what we teach but in how we do it. In my experience, and I think that this is true for most of my peers trained in US institutions, the way we were taught was as if we weren't ready to learn. The overall attitude being we'll tell you in grad school. This has been doubly frustrating now after encountering the attitude of you should have learned all this in undergrad. I can understand where this comes from: physics requires quite a bit of math. However, me and I think my peers also wish more math had been taught math by the physicists.
Smolin's book never talks about the possible inadequacies of undergrad education (perhaps for good reason), which was a bit disappointing for me. Maybe it will get me to finish the essay I've been writing about this subject some day...
posted by rz at 6:05 AM
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