5 ms·

Is it time to change the undergraduate physics curriculum?

48 points by miobrien 9y ago

rocqua 9y ago
There is a weird tension between universities preparing people for academia or preparing preparing people for a job. On the one hand, universities are academic places. They are not job training, they are where you learn the scientific basis of a subject. On the other hand, cold hard statistics says that most people don't stay in academia (and considering reports, academia is already saturated with willing recruits). So therefore it makes sense that universities prepare people for a job at a company. This issue is exaggerated in the Netherlands (where I live) because we have a formal difference between 'University' and 'HBO' (Translates to Higher Vocational Training). On the face of it, the former is academic and the latter is focused on getting a job. However, University has higher acces requirements, and is therefore more prestigious. This means that University will probably land you a better job than HBO even though HBO probably prepares you better for doing your job. Thus, Universities here are focusing on soft-skills and preparing people for the working life. It seems they are forgetting they are academic because people who should be going to HBO are going to university for 'Virtue signaling'. But I digress. In general, there seems to be an assumption that college will prepare you for life afterwards. It is thought unreasonable that someone with only a college education isn't suited for a job. The response to this is to focus on including such practical matters in a college education; as opposed to encouraging students to get extra-curricular experience. /rant
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > ...universities preparing people for academia... I don't think there are many university programs explicitly designed to prepare people for academia. Where it happens, it's mostly just a case of people teaching what they know. > So therefore it makes sense that universities prepare people for a job at a company. This, of course, ignores the possibility that "learn[ing] the scientific basis of a subject" is not useful in an industrial career.
CalChris 9y ago
This article is more of a compare and contrast between the US and UK education systems as a whole and very little if not zero on the undergraduate physics curriculum itself. I majored in EECS, an engineering major, and I only took 3 semesters of physics. And so to disagree with a point in the article, I loved my out of major and out of engineering classes. At Berkeley you’re limited to 4 years and summer school. There were classes I wanted to take in my major that I couldn’t. But I took a lot and after 4 years, I was wiped and more would have been torture. I prefer the US system. It’s more flexible.
foob 9y ago
I'm a former physicist and I was expecting this article to make a different point (particularly because it's on HN). Physics education is heavily centered around--well... physics--but the majority of what most physicists do on a daily basis is really software engineering, and most physicists are woefully unprepared for that. The majority of them are talented enough to figure a lot of it out as they go, but best practices like testing and code reviews were basically unheard of when I was in the field. I wasn't in a small laboratory experiment either, I'm talking about a large-scale collaboration that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and involved thousands of people. A simple bug in someone's code could literally have a major impact on the field. Another comment asked whether universities are too focused on preparing people for academia rather than a job, but I honestly think that they're not even really focused properly on preparing them for academia. Teaching physics is a hard problem because there's a long and rich history of building upon previous advancements. You can't teach somebody quantum chromodynamics without first teaching them quantum electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics, classical mechanics, and all of the mathematical methods that come along with these. It's hard to legitimately get anywhere close to the cutting edge in graduate school, let alone as an undergraduate. I hope that this has changed somewhat in the last decade, but most of the teaching methods in these subjects have historically been unchanged since the 70s. I strongly believe that it would be better preparation, for both academia and the real world, to integrate much more of an emphasis on simulation, visualization, and numerical methods into these requisite courses. These would be far more constructive for people developing skills that they simply can't get from doing problems on paper.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  > but the majority of what most physicists due on a daily basis is really software engineering Do you have a cite or explanation for this claim? Sure, particle physics is mostly software these days, but I don't think this is true for anywhere near a majority of physicists.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - 9y ago
avmich 9y ago
I frankly hoped to read something along e.g. the line of Scott Aaronson mentioning that now we understand quantum mechanics sufficiently better to approach teaching it differently. Then he starts it with a concept of probability more broad than the classical one. We might have a good approach to classical physics - though I wouldn't bet on that, may be we really should teach classical mechanics closer to SICM, by Sussman, approach. But quantum physics leaves doubts even with undergraduates majoring in physics.
- kurthr 9y ago
  I like constraint based physics, and phase-space/Lagrangian/Hamiltonian methods are very useful both for solving difficult mechanical problems, as well as, seeing connections with QM, optics, etc. However, for most freshmen, the math is simply beyond them in their first year. Unless you can delay until multivariate, partial differentitals, and at least ODE... it won't stick. On casual examination SICM looks more like a substitute for Goldstien's Classical Mechanics, but perhaps it is better. Nominally, I'd recommend that in the late 2nd or 3rd undergraduate year. One thing that I'm quite happy with in my physics education is that the faculty went to quite some effort to make sure that the math and physics tracked each other so that you would see the theory and practice twice and intertwined. One thing that was missing (as other's have mentioned) was numerical methods and programming techniques, which I think could also be covered in a parallel track.
  - psykotic 9y ago
    > However, for most freshmen, the math is simply beyond them in their first year. You can introduce Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics very early on if you're okay with hand-waving over some of the analytical details and presenting it mostly as a problem solving tool. E.g. David Morin's Introduction to Classical Mechanics does a great job with minimal formal prerequisites (freshman calculus is adequate for the majority of the book) though its exercises and problems, which are the book's highlight, will be too challenging for most freshmen. I think a low-brow problem solving centric approach is ideal as an introduction to Lagrangian mechanics in particular (not so much Hamiltonian mechanics) since the advantages are so stark and obvious compared to the Newtonian formalism. You don't have to worry about how velocities and forces transform to write down the equations of motion. You just write down the Lagrangian and take derivatives. That's something every student will immediately appreciate.
Alextigtig 9y ago
I'm a current undergraduate majoring in physics at a major US university, and I strongly disagree with the assumptions and the conclusions that comprise this article. Firstly, the article lists two anecdotes as definitive proof that everyone hates their gen-ed classes. This is almost invariably wrong: because students have enormous flexibility in choosing their gen-ed classes (these literally be any number of classes out of thousands at a liberal arts college) they are much more inclined to pursue a legitimate area of interest outside their major. In fact, many of my friends actually change their major _because_ of a gen-ed class they were required to take. This leads to my next point about not having a set major: upwards of 50% of undergraduates at my university change the major that they applied to the school for, and over 90% of graduating students conclude that they ended up in the correct major. To reduce all flexibility whatsoever in majoring, I think, is a fatal flaw that does much more harm than good. In fact, the little "good" the 3-year-major approach has – i.e. less money/time spent at college, end up more advanced in respective field – is far less valuable than the tangential skills one may pick up from gen-ed requirements. That point about scheduling being so complicated "that at least one company, Hobson’s, makes money selling software" to navigate the process is just ridiculous: companies make money delivering burritos; does the burrito selling process need to be rethought? My high school had software that they paid for to schedule classes, and so do many. Finally, the author's conclusions are not only contradictory but paint a worrisome future for undergraduates. We should "give students more freedom to pursue their interests," but also create "less choice" for classes? In addition, his last point about teaching students "communication, facility with widely used software, and teamwork" is literally the purpose of gen-ed requirements. Undergraduates should be treated as adults: many (if not all) colleges have time-honored "honor code" traditions, wherein students are expected to act honorably and maturely in examination requirements. If we are to instead prescribe each course each student should take, remove all flexibility to study unrelated subject areas, and create a uniform assembly line through which every undergraduate passes without deviation, not only would students lose the most valuable parts of a university education, but they would also be woefully unprepared for the variety of challenges that life faces.
uoaei 9y ago
Having been through the track a few years ago at a reasonably large university, it was somewhat limiting that the teaching style basically pushed the narrative that "these people thought this stuff a while ago but they were wrong and here's why, so shut up about it lest you be made a fool." It totally kills the inquisitive and investigatory nature that is the field of physics. A side-effect to this, too, was that when students aren't testing the boundaries and running into all these limiting cases with their own inquisitions, they don't get the kinds of insights that really make understanding physical systems intuitive. For instance, did you know Hamiltonian systems must have an even number of dimensions? It makes sense now that I think about it wrt Newton's 2nd, but I learned this last week in a graduate-level math course. I'd love to see more of a seminar-type setup for courses where every week an investigation is done and yhe students try to figure it out, while the teacher provides a gentle nudge in the right direction when mistakes are made along with the lessons learned from history. IMO this would make for a much more solid understanding of the scientific method and progress re: "standing on the shoulders of giants."

48 points by miobrien 9y ago

There is a weird tension between universities preparing people for academia or preparing preparing people for a job. On the one hand, universities are academic places. They are not job training, they are where you learn the scientific basis of a subject. On the other hand, cold hard statistics says that most people don't stay in academia (and considering reports, academia is already saturated with willing recruits). So therefore it makes sense that universities prepare people for a job at a company. This issue is exaggerated in the Netherlands (where I live) because we have a formal difference between 'University' and 'HBO' (Translates to Higher Vocational Training). On the face of it, the former is academic and the latter is focused on getting a job. However, University has higher acces requirements, and is therefore more prestigious. This means that University will probably land you a better job than HBO even though HBO probably prepares you better for doing your job. Thus, Universities here are focusing on soft-skills and preparing people for the working life. It seems they are forgetting they are academic because people who should be going to HBO are going to university for 'Virtue signaling'. But I digress. In general, there seems to be an assumption that college will prepare you for life afterwards. It is thought unreasonable that someone with only a college education isn't suited for a job. The response to this is to focus on including such practical matters in a college education; as opposed to encouraging students to get extra-curricular experience. /rant

throwawayjava 9y ago
> ...universities preparing people for academia... I don't think there are many university programs explicitly designed to prepare people for academia. Where it happens, it's mostly just a case of people teaching what they know. > So therefore it makes sense that universities prepare people for a job at a company. This, of course, ignores the possibility that "learn[ing] the scientific basis of a subject" is not useful in an industrial career.

CalChris 9y ago

This article is more of a compare and contrast between the US and UK education systems as a whole and very little if not zero on the undergraduate physics curriculum itself. I majored in EECS, an engineering major, and I only took 3 semesters of physics. And so to disagree with a point in the article, I loved my out of major and out of engineering classes. At Berkeley you’re limited to 4 years and summer school. There were classes I wanted to take in my major that I couldn’t. But I took a lot and after 4 years, I was wiped and more would have been torture. I prefer the US system. It’s more flexible.

foob 9y ago

I'm a former physicist and I was expecting this article to make a different point (particularly because it's on HN). Physics education is heavily centered around--well... physics--but the majority of what most physicists do on a daily basis is really software engineering, and most physicists are woefully unprepared for that. The majority of them are talented enough to figure a lot of it out as they go, but best practices like testing and code reviews were basically unheard of when I was in the field. I wasn't in a small laboratory experiment either, I'm talking about a large-scale collaboration that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and involved thousands of people. A simple bug in someone's code could literally have a major impact on the field. Another comment asked whether universities are too focused on preparing people for academia rather than a job, but I honestly think that they're not even really focused properly on preparing them for academia. Teaching physics is a hard problem because there's a long and rich history of building upon previous advancements. You can't teach somebody quantum chromodynamics without first teaching them quantum electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics, classical mechanics, and all of the mathematical methods that come along with these. It's hard to legitimately get anywhere close to the cutting edge in graduate school, let alone as an undergraduate. I hope that this has changed somewhat in the last decade, but most of the teaching methods in these subjects have historically been unchanged since the 70s. I strongly believe that it would be better preparation, for both academia and the real world, to integrate much more of an emphasis on simulation, visualization, and numerical methods into these requisite courses. These would be far more constructive for people developing skills that they simply can't get from doing problems on paper.

jessriedel 9y ago
> but the majority of what most physicists due on a daily basis is really software engineering Do you have a cite or explanation for this claim? Sure, particle physics is mostly software these days, but I don't think this is true for anywhere near a majority of physicists.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 9y ago

avmich 9y ago

I frankly hoped to read something along e.g. the line of Scott Aaronson mentioning that now we understand quantum mechanics sufficiently better to approach teaching it differently. Then he starts it with a concept of probability more broad than the classical one. We might have a good approach to classical physics - though I wouldn't bet on that, may be we really should teach classical mechanics closer to SICM, by Sussman, approach. But quantum physics leaves doubts even with undergraduates majoring in physics.

kurthr 9y ago
I like constraint based physics, and phase-space/Lagrangian/Hamiltonian methods are very useful both for solving difficult mechanical problems, as well as, seeing connections with QM, optics, etc. However, for most freshmen, the math is simply beyond them in their first year. Unless you can delay until multivariate, partial differentitals, and at least ODE... it won't stick. On casual examination SICM looks more like a substitute for Goldstien's Classical Mechanics, but perhaps it is better. Nominally, I'd recommend that in the late 2nd or 3rd undergraduate year. One thing that I'm quite happy with in my physics education is that the faculty went to quite some effort to make sure that the math and physics tracked each other so that you would see the theory and practice twice and intertwined. One thing that was missing (as other's have mentioned) was numerical methods and programming techniques, which I think could also be covered in a parallel track.
- psykotic 9y ago
  > However, for most freshmen, the math is simply beyond them in their first year. You can introduce Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics very early on if you're okay with hand-waving over some of the analytical details and presenting it mostly as a problem solving tool. E.g. David Morin's Introduction to Classical Mechanics does a great job with minimal formal prerequisites (freshman calculus is adequate for the majority of the book) though its exercises and problems, which are the book's highlight, will be too challenging for most freshmen. I think a low-brow problem solving centric approach is ideal as an introduction to Lagrangian mechanics in particular (not so much Hamiltonian mechanics) since the advantages are so stark and obvious compared to the Newtonian formalism. You don't have to worry about how velocities and forces transform to write down the equations of motion. You just write down the Lagrangian and take derivatives. That's something every student will immediately appreciate.

Alextigtig 9y ago

I'm a current undergraduate majoring in physics at a major US university, and I strongly disagree with the assumptions and the conclusions that comprise this article. Firstly, the article lists two anecdotes as definitive proof that everyone hates their gen-ed classes. This is almost invariably wrong: because students have enormous flexibility in choosing their gen-ed classes (these literally be any number of classes out of thousands at a liberal arts college) they are much more inclined to pursue a legitimate area of interest outside their major. In fact, many of my friends actually change their major _because_ of a gen-ed class they were required to take. This leads to my next point about not having a set major: upwards of 50% of undergraduates at my university change the major that they applied to the school for, and over 90% of graduating students conclude that they ended up in the correct major. To reduce all flexibility whatsoever in majoring, I think, is a fatal flaw that does much more harm than good. In fact, the little "good" the 3-year-major approach has – i.e. less money/time spent at college, end up more advanced in respective field – is far less valuable than the tangential skills one may pick up from gen-ed requirements. That point about scheduling being so complicated "that at least one company, Hobson’s, makes money selling software" to navigate the process is just ridiculous: companies make money delivering burritos; does the burrito selling process need to be rethought? My high school had software that they paid for to schedule classes, and so do many. Finally, the author's conclusions are not only contradictory but paint a worrisome future for undergraduates. We should "give students more freedom to pursue their interests," but also create "less choice" for classes? In addition, his last point about teaching students "communication, facility with widely used software, and teamwork" is literally the purpose of gen-ed requirements. Undergraduates should be treated as adults: many (if not all) colleges have time-honored "honor code" traditions, wherein students are expected to act honorably and maturely in examination requirements. If we are to instead prescribe each course each student should take, remove all flexibility to study unrelated subject areas, and create a uniform assembly line through which every undergraduate passes without deviation, not only would students lose the most valuable parts of a university education, but they would also be woefully unprepared for the variety of challenges that life faces.

uoaei 9y ago

Having been through the track a few years ago at a reasonably large university, it was somewhat limiting that the teaching style basically pushed the narrative that "these people thought this stuff a while ago but they were wrong and here's why, so shut up about it lest you be made a fool." It totally kills the inquisitive and investigatory nature that is the field of physics. A side-effect to this, too, was that when students aren't testing the boundaries and running into all these limiting cases with their own inquisitions, they don't get the kinds of insights that really make understanding physical systems intuitive. For instance, did you know Hamiltonian systems must have an even number of dimensions? It makes sense now that I think about it wrt Newton's 2nd, but I learned this last week in a graduate-level math course. I'd love to see more of a seminar-type setup for courses where every week an investigation is done and yhe students try to figure it out, while the teacher provides a gentle nudge in the right direction when mistakes are made along with the lessons learned from history. IMO this would make for a much more solid understanding of the scientific method and progress re: "standing on the shoulders of giants."