
Is it time to change the undergraduate physics curriculum? - miobrien
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3742
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foob
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
> 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.

~~~
mmmBacon
Optical physicist here. I spend >80% of my time writing software and agree
that I was woefully unprepared for this by my education. When I was a student
the prevailing attitude that skills like programming were "trivial" and that
formalized programming/computer science classes were unnecessary because it
could be easily learned.

~~~
jessriedel
My comment doesn't address whether physicist who mostly write software are
prepared to do it, it addresses the fraction of physicists who are doing this.

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rocqua
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
_> ...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.

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CalChris
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.

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uoaei
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."

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Alextigtig
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.

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avmich
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
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
> 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.

