Mixing
the Practical and the Scholarly in Physics Education
February 2005, page 12
John Neumann’s letter calling for
inclusion of fluid mechanics in the physics curriculum
(Physics Today, June 2004, page 14) is quite
interesting. I suggest, however, that mechanical
engineers are generally better trained in computational
methods than physicists are, and it is this training,
rather than an academic course in fluid dynamics, which
gives them an edge in applied problems.
I like the fundamental approach
of the physics curriculum. In fact, I would argue
for the reestablishment of professorships of natural
philosophy and physics. Today’s graduate training
seems to suffer from a fissure between course work on
the one hand and, on the other, research in which
professors and students are overly dependent on the
tools of the trade—for example, canned computer
codes for theoretical studies. That situation in turn
leads to the stifling of really innovative and
trenchant work.
Clearly there is a danger that an
overemphasis on practical training and technical skills
could shift the physics curriculum toward a course of
study expected for a certificate from a
vocational-technical institute rather than for a PhD
from a major university. I have always found that the
chemistry curriculum tends to have an orientation that
emphasizes the practical rather than the scholarly,
such that the poor physical chemist, for example, is
offered no courses in optics, no classical or quantum
electrodynamics, and just enough quantum mechanics so
that the
student can make sense of spectroscopy for
chemical analysis. It seems to me that the American Chemical
Society is minimalist in acknowledging the existence of quantum
or theoretical chemistry, notwithstanding all the good
theoretical work performed in chemistry departments roughly
since the publication of the distinguished text in 1935 by
Linus Pauling and E. Bright Wilson, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics: With Applications
to Chemistry (McGraw-Hill).
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