Sadly, I’m not here to announce that applications are now being accepted for students who would like to participate in this year’s Undergraduate Theory Institute. That’s because there is no such thing as the Undergraduate Theory Institute, at least as far as I know. (Google doesn’t know of one either.) But I think it would be a great idea — maybe if I post it here on the blog someone will start it.
It’s increasingly common for physics students to particpate in some kind of research during their undergraduate years. The NSF has a very successful Research Experience for Undergraduates program, for example, that funds students to do summer research, typically at an institution other than their own. Getting involved in research as early as possible is a great idea for students, for a number of reasons. Most importantly, the flavor of doing real research, where the answers aren’t in the back of the book, is utterly different from almost any classroom experience or even self-study, where you are trying to learn material that someone else has already mastered. The move from following a course of study to striking out into the unknown is one of the hardest transitions to make during graduate school, and getting a head start is an enormous help. On a more prosaic level, it’s useful to work closely with an advisor who can end up writing letters of recommendation. And let’s not forget that it can be a lot of fun!
Unfortunately, the prospects are very different for students who want to do theory vs. experiment. It’s often true that, on an experimental project, a student with just a hand on the basics of introductory physics can come in and learn something about the particular experiment being undertaken, and after a brief learning period can soon be contributing seriously to the work. On the theoretical side, the learning curve is much less steep, and a lot more background knowledge is required before a student can do something interesting. In my field, until you’ve at least taken courses in quantum field theory and general relativity, it’s hard to do original work.
Nevertheless, like many other theoretical physicists, I get a lot of requests from undergrads who would like to do research. I very much enjoy doing research and having students, but to be honest it’s often very difficult to find things for them to do, since the background just isn’t there. I’ve done it, quite a few times — I’ve supervised four Bachelor’s theses, and three summer research students. Sometimes everything falls into place, and it ends up with an interesting publishable paper. More often it’s an excuse to let the students learn a bit GR or QFT, and maybe get started on the very basics of a problem, before they grow up and graduate.
There’s a perfectly good response to this situation, which is: even if you eventually want to become a theorist, it’s a great idea to do experimental research as an undergrad. Maybe you won’t be immersed in the kind of work you ultimately want to pursue, but (1) understanding something about how experiments work is an unambiguously good thing, and (2) the important lesson is not in the details of the particular field, but in what it’s like to do research, which is almost independent of the type of research you’re doing. That’s what I did, when at Villanova I did work on photometry of eclipsing variable stars; I got a nice paper out of that. (And my favorite star, Epsilon Aurigae, will be going into eclipse again in another couple of years, at which point I expect our model to be spectacularly confirmed, and fame and fortune to follow.)
And I tell this to people all the time, but still the students want to do theory! Impatient little buggers. But I can hardly blame them — we lure them into the field with elaborate tales of black holes and supersymmetry and dark energy, and it only eventually becomes clear that they won’t really learn about that stuff until they’re well into grad school, if then.
So I had the idea for an undergraduate theory institute. The amount of theoretical background you need to do useful work is quite substantial, much larger than one could squeeze into one summer, it’s true. On the other hand, six weeks of fairly intensive study between the junior and senior year could serve to introduce enthusiastic students to many of the basic ideas they will eventually be encountering as theorists. If nothing else, they could become familiar with a bunch of buzzwords they’ll be hearing for years. That sounds superficial, but could potentially be of great use — it means that they can immediately start going to seminars and chatting with professors when they get to grad school, and have a much better grasp on the kinds of ideas that are being thrown around.
So, a six-week summer course for undergrads. Much self-study, but regular lectures by faculty and perhaps postdocs. A couple of seminars on sexy stuff of current research interest, as a reward, but mostly focusing on the basic tools of theoretical research in field theory and gravitation. (Since that what I know about — other specialties are welcome to chime in!) Here’s what I imagine the syllabus to basically be like:
- Special relativity, index notation, vectors, tensors.
- Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics.
- Classical scalar field theory.
- Gauge theories and electromagnetism.
- Basics of Lie groups, SU(n).
- Non-abelian symmetries.
- Spontaneous symmetry breakdown, the Higgs mechanism.
- Topological defects.
- Spacetime curvature and Einstein’s equation.
- Schwarzschild and Robertson-Walker spacetimes.
- Basics of field quantization and Feynman diagrams.
Something like that, anyway. It seems like a tremendous amount to cover, but it would all be fairly brisk, and there are benefits to be gained by seeing it all at once in the same place, surrounded by a group of other bright students studying the same material. Wouldn’t you have loved to have such an introduction as an undergrad? If we put together some nice lecture notes, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to get them published as a cheap reference book.
All I need now is a substantial (and reliable) source of funding, someone to write the lectures and deliver them, a host institution, and an organizational wizard to take care of logistics. I will look over the whole operation as a benevolent, if somewhat disconnected, father figure, whose main role will be to shoot the breeze with the students at the late-night coffee and whisky hours. Any takers?
January 12th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
One shouldn’t neglect the “easy” research road for undergrad theorists: computational projects. It’s a lot easier to solve many equations numerically on a computer than it is to derive nice analytical solutions on paper. I’ve seen undergraduate research students doing useful work using condensed matter Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations, gravitational wave signal detection routines, and in your own field, mucking around with CMBfast code. Giving the ever-increasing prevalence of numerics in physics, this isn’t even something that is relegated to students and other peons — it’s the bread and butter of many theorists’ day jobs.
Of course, the advanced theory and mathematics is necessary to fully understand what’s going on, but that’s true for experimentalists as well. Not having it, though, doesn’t have to be an obstacle to budding theorists any more than it is to their experimentalist counterparts. Running, tinkering with, and analyzing the output of existing computer codes is probably nowadays the theoretical equivalent to soldering and gluing in a lab.
P.S. I presume you meant to say that the theoretical learning curve is much more steep, not much less steep.
January 12th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I’d be happy to do at least a few lectures! But it sounds like a bit much; a few years ago I was the TA/grader for an undergraduate cosmology course which covered maybe three or four at most of the topics you listed, spread out over a quarter (10 weeks)… and it seemed like some students were barely keeping up.
January 12th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
1. Thanks to string theory, it is no longer true that a student has to know QFT and GR to do original research. All they need to know is a little algebraic geometry.
2. The traditional way for students to get involved with theoretical research is through computer programming.
Therefore, the solution is to give your undergrads a computer and set them loose to explore the landscape. Within months they will have accomplished some Stanford quality theoretical research.
January 12th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Oh man! I would’ve loved to have something like that as an undergrad.
It may also be a good idea to make it a two-summer program. Spend one summer preparing the students and have them come back to try to do some real work.
As a student, I think I agree with BG in that the first summer might be a bit too intensive. Perhaps it could work out to attempt less topics and have the student learn some of them in the year in between the two summers. Of course, this may involve a bit more commitment on the part of the advisor.
January 12th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Dream-land sounds like a good place to start looking for the realization of this dreamy idea.
Isn’t the scope you outlined nothing more than all the material mandatorily covered in graduate school? And how many years of actual studying and experimenting with the concepts does it actually take an average physics graduate student to grasp them? And how many years of post-graduate work does it take to become actually comfortable and confident, if at all? Too ambitious and too overwhelming.
Having been one of the statistics you mentioned, I would go ahead and defend the excuse for learning some GR and/or QFT one on one with an advisor outside of the usual course-work setting. Putting it lightly, it’s just more fun. No deadlines to meet being one of the reasons. Having all the time in the world to derive and re-derive what not until you finally scope the result to make some sense. And head-on start at learning it in the class-room later. Because the truth is that no genius out there, understood Feynman’s diagrams, or the significance of the metric from the first attempt. It took many classes, many problems, many questions, and many discussions. True, surrounded by bright kids is an adventage in the process of understanding(as is in the process of mis-understanding)(in fact, all I learned I sponged off from my peers and one-on-one advisors; classes were over-rated).
Just for completeness. I spent one summer on an experimental project which was utterly boring, and only taught me the discipline to write proper C code. Then I spent two glorious summers enjoying GR, QFT, rollerblading and softball.
Further, writing a paper on what has been learned, no matter how insignificant, and delivering a brief speech, is a good excercise no matter what the future direction is. (Understandably, I didn’t share this view back in the day, clearly express in endlessed complaints). In a class-room setting, this can be achieved, but not nearly as successfully.
Little steps each day will take you to greater understanding, than one giant leap at one time. What is the rush! Relax and enjoy the ride, and maybe it will be a long one.
Even when I wish I knew everything, I sit back, and relax in my sea of ignorance, enjoying the process of learning. There is no learning destination. Maybe at death. But that is too grim.
Cheers and Happy New Year.
January 12th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
For the coffee and whiskey? Yes.
January 12th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Now I’m confused about “learning curve.” What is it supposed to be a plot of? Wouldn’t it take longer to climb a shallow curve than a steep one?
Anyway — I think people would be surprised at how much could be covered in six weeks over the summer. Much more than in a one-semester course, for the simple reason that you can be remarkably superficial! If I’m teaching a GR course, I want to derive the expressions for the Riemann tensor and connection coefficients, prove that they behave properly under coordinate transformations, etc. Here, they’d just get the formulas and move on to calculating. I covered all of GR in a few hours at the SLAC Summer Institute a while back, starting in the morning and finished in time for lunch.
Also, I’m assuming that the students come in with some prior exposure to Lagrangians and special relativity (not to mention quantum mechanics and E&M), so those are really just touch-up reviews.
January 12th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
As an undergrad I worked in experiment, and I would really strongly encourage anyone interested in doing theory to do so. Plenty of theorists, even those doing relatively phenomenological things, seem to have a very skewed notion of what experimentalists do and what a given experiment is or is not capable of.
Also, from what I’ve seen, undergrads who are capable of doing theory research will be taking graduate courses anyway, at least if they’re attending schools with decent graduate programs. I know plenty of people who took QFT as undergraduates. I really think one of the best things schools can do for theory-minded undergrads is to make it easier for them to do things like this. I had no problem skipping some prerequisites, but I did have my coursework slowed down by well-meaning advice and official guidelines. Also, in my senior year I was told by the undergraduate program chair that I had failed to complete the official course requirements because I had taken graduate courses in place of some of the expected undergraduate courses. I was told that they would allow me to do this, so long as I didn’t tell any other students that they could “get away with” this! It was all rather odd.
January 12th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
You know, I never really thought about it, but I think you’re right on the whole learning curve thing. It really ought to be a shallow learning curve after all, even though no one uses it that way. (They probably imagine it takes a long time to climb a steep hill, so a learning curve that takes a long time to climb must be steep.)
As for your course suggestion, I would have loved to have had such a summer course. I agree that you can get up to speed on learning subjects at a “calculation” level much faster than at a “grad course” level. I’m still not sure whether it would be enough to get an undergrad up to speed on doing theory research. Even grad students take a while before they start becoming useful in a lot of theory areas. A six-week concentration on just a few of those topics would probably be sufficient to jump-start a project focused on those topics, though. But perhaps I am being overly pessimistic since I have never participated in a summer school boot camp myself.
January 12th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
A steep learning curve is one where it is difficult to make much forward progress until one has mastered something difficult. A shallow learning curve has many easily digested concepts that slowly build up. One feels that one is making progress. A steep learning curve has some very challenging concepts at the beginning and one does feel like one is making progress until challenging concepts are mastered. Theoretical physics is the paradigm of a steep learning curve.
January 12th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
It looks like David Griffiths’ “Introduction to Elementary Particles” textbook covers half of the topics in that list, in a relatively painless manner for undergrads.
I can’t think of any particular books and/or papers which cover the remaining topics in a relatively painless manner. Maybe Ryder and/or Zee’s books on quantum field theory could cover basic field quantization and perturbation theory in a “cartoon-like” manner? Offhand I can’t think of any really elementary presentations of general relativity, that would be relatively painless or “cartoonish”.
January 12th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Sean,
I know I am no expert yet, but if something were to come of this I would help write/give lectures in the future. I love doing that, I do it for the theory group here at BYU. I hosted a semester long weekly seminar on Nakahara’s book at BYU and lectured about a lot of advanced things. I love doing this kind of stuff.
I would personally finance going to such an institute in the future to lecture. Of course, it may be a couple years before I can convince the appropriate people to trust me. But they will eventually, so I will pledge my help in advance.
Again, just want to pledge my support if anything comes of this.
January 12th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
I always interpreted the “learning curve” as a plot of difficulty vs. time (or “knowledge”, or some proxy for it). So a field with a steep learning curve is one that gets difficult very quickly, whereas a shallow learning curve means one can learn quite a lot before encountering too much difficulty.
Anyway, I guess the aim of the summer course is to give undergrads some tools so they can get started? How much theory work requires only a superficial understanding? I once developed an intense one-week introduction to cosmology for gifted high school students, and I found that often I would -try- to give some “superficial” understanding to get them started calculating, but I kept realizing they were missing some key detail and repeatedly had to back up and fill in a lot of background. I realized that many things in cosmology weren’t so “superficial” to begin with.
It still might work, but you’d need someone far more brilliant than me to develop the curriculum
January 12th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
The problem I see with a theory summer school is that it isn’t research: it’s completely a “classroom experience”. The students will spend their most productive undergrad summer (from the perspective of grad school apps) taking a class. While this will serve future theorists well and give them a jump-start into grad research, I don’t think this was the aim of the proposal. It won’t give them the understanding of what a research physicist does day-to-day, which is really the point of undergrad research, more than learning physics (not to denigrate learning physics or anything, this is also said in the original post). Moreover, if good work can be done with only a “calculating level” of the material, then I’d think that ancillary skills like programming would figure heavily into what the student would need for that particular project, and research experience is what really gives students these ancillary skills. My experience is that you need one of two things to do, say, HE theory as a beginning student: QFT or FORTRAN, and QFT at the calculating level won’t eliminate the need for FORTRAN.
Also, six weeks really leaves only 4 or 5 weeks remaining in the summer, too little time to return to your institution to work with an advisor there.
I did experimental work as an undergrad, hated it, and now I’m a theory grad and like it much more. But since experiment is the norm in physics, I can’t say I regret trying it. At the very least I’m not in the shoes of one fellow grad who asked “What’s that thing on your desk?” to an experimentalist. (”It’s a soldering iron.” “So what’s the coil thing it sits in?” “It’s so the hot tip won’t burn anything.”)
January 12th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
I did a project in Quantum Computers, all you need is LinAlg and QM and you’re ready to go.
I think it’s in the topics, really…. probably experimental research groups will have better theoretical topics to pursue as well.
January 12th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Or interdisciplinary. Statistical physics models for evolution was another (non research) project I had.
January 12th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Sean,
Wouldn’t a summer school of this sort be more appropriate between sophomore and junior year, or for that matter, freshman and sophomore year? Or maybe even for really highly motivated high school kids?
When I was first in college, I tried to study basic quantum mechanics on my own and managed to get as far as doing time dependent perturbation theory calculations and some basic quantum field theory (ie. tree level Feynman diagram calculations). Though at the time, I don’t think I really understood it completely. If there was such a summer school of this sort in those days, I probably would have applied.
January 12th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
As an undergrad who is currently doing a senior thesis in theory, this topic is of direct relevance to me. Although it would be great if undergraduates could be exposed to such exciting topics as those mentioned, I’m not sure if it would help the aspiring theorist too much. I was able to undertake a thesis with a much less extensive background than would be acquired in such a program: I had taken Sean’s undergrad GR class, knew the basics of QFT, and that’s about it (although my mathematics background is probably quite a bit more extensive than the average physics undergrad). I found that once you convince the professor that you’re serious about working on a problem and understand the basics, you can pretty much pick up what you need as you go along. I feel I’ve learned more over the past four months than I have in any class.
In short, I just wanted to point out that doing theoretical work as an undergraduate is not as far-fetched as most people say it is. I think it takes a basic knowledge in a few subjects and an intense desire to learn as much as you can on your own. A summer program would probably help, but I don’t think it would be too valuable.
January 12th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
In the UK we have two kinds of undergraduate physics degrees, the bachelors (BSc) and the MPhys. The M stands for (where have we heard that before?) ‘Masters’ but this is not actually a masters degree but an extended undergrad degree. Anyway… it includes – at least the way we cover it at my university (Surrey) – a full research year. This our students spend at an international research facility in the Europe of North America such as at Yale, Berkeley, Florida State, MSU etc. This they do during a calender year in between the Autumn and Spring semesters of their final year, so they have pretty much covered a lot of the basics (qm, special rel, electromag, condensed matter). Sometimes the students choose a theory research project and we try to place them accordingly. For instance I fixed up a student work in the theory group at TRIUMF Lab in Vancouver on modelling nuclear reactions in astrophysics. All good stuff and our students really get a lot out of their year. they often get their names on papers including PRLs and get to present their work at international conferences. They come back for their final semester very keen to sign up for PhD having had a decent taste of life as a grad student at the cutting edge.
January 12th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
As an undergrad who has two years left and will be taking graduate classes next fall, I have to say that I would apply if this was available. I’m currently working through Gravitation, and I think that the goal wouldn’t necessarily need to be cover all of a subject, or even all of the derivations. If your applying to the program, I would think one could probably pick up a book and understand most of it (not necessarily easily). There are definitely subjects that are non-intuitive where a good lecture would have saved significant hassle (forms, for example) and enable someone to pick up the rest on their own much easier. I think that would be a much better use then concentrating on calculations. Picking up a book and figuring out how to do calculations is (relatively) easy compared to trying to pick up a book and understand the deeper concepts. I’ll also add I’ve noticed studying on your own is significantly easier if you have even 30 minutes of time to talk to someone / get a few questions straightened out once or twice a week, so there would be a definite positive effect from being around other undergrads. I’d even venture that you could cover a bit more (or in more depth) if you had people read a bit of background material before coming (specifically the special relativity and mechanics). Even if it was still reviewed, it would be easier then having people come in blind. I don’t think it would be problematic to cover that in 6 weeks, especially if you didn’t have to try to do it while taking your other undergraduate classes.
January 12th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
I would whole-heartedly support this intensive, accelerated summer course. This is in part because I find myself trying to make time to independently study some of the topics listed in Sean’s “curriculum” since my undergraduate curriculum doesn’t leave a lot of room to take specialized coursework (I am cramming nuclear/particle physics, graduate quantum theory, graduate stat mech, a special topics math course on math methods in QM, and an intro to string theory course into my last semester as an undergrad, largely because this is the first time I’ve had any room in my schedule to take such classes, and I am utterly excited to finally have some flexibility in my curriculum.). I am applying to several of the top-ranked universities for grad school, and having excelled at a state school (in my home state) with a rather average reputation has left me wondering what sort of preparation the bulk of students going into these programs will be. As such, I have enthusiastically, but perhaps a little nervously, been pursuing opportunities to expand my knowledge as far beyond the undergraduate curriculum as I can, and you can say that is partly because I naively believe that the undergrads coming out of Caltech, Harvard, MIT, etc, will have been exposed, by the virtue of their exalted institutions, to more graduate-level concepts by the time they graduate with their 4-year degree.
Sean, you and any other well-wishing theorists should have brought this up years ago…and I only say that because I have wished for something similar myself in the past and would have leapt at the opportunity. If anything, it would have been nice to have a structured introduction to these higher-level theoretical topics to help ease the transition into self-guided independent study.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Sign me up, Sean! I’d take that course in a heartbeat. And Jim Al-Khalili, I love that you mentioned MSU in that list of international research destinations. Woo Go State!
January 12th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
I agree with Paul. Even I, who am clearly leaning into experimental physics, would’ve liked to have such a summer experience.
Sean, we need you to make this Undergraduate Theory Institute. If you have some time left, build a time machine, ’cause I want to go back in time to my junior year and enroll.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
This sounds like a wonderful idea. When I was an undergrad I did three REUs. For my first one I thought I’d be doing some kind of experiment and enjoy it, since I loved the physics labs. But when I got there, I got paired up with a theorist. I had to go through one chapter of Jackson in the first few weeks of the summer to be able to understand all the equations that were involved in the project. It was hard work, but it was so rewarding that at that point I decided I’d be a theorist. In my second REU I did observational work (data analysis of red giants’ spectra), and liked it but didn’t love it. In the third REU I did experimentation, but I was mostly writing code for analysis of the data from the experiment — though I did get to play with circuit boxes and soldering irons, which was rather interesting and boring at the same time. In any case, even though the REUs were great experiences where I learned about research and explored areas that I would have never thought about, an intensive summer institute on some field of theoretical physics or astrophysics would have been incredibly useful.
I did get to participate in one eventually, but not as a student. UT Brownsville has a summer school thing in gravitational waves. Most of the students are undergrads, with one or two first-year grads thrown into the mix. I was an upcoming fourth-year astro grad then, working on black hole mergers and structure formation, so my advisor (who lectured in the summer school sometimes) asked me to be his TA that summer. The students learned so much. Everything from GR to astrophysical sources to numerical relativity was discussed there. It was even a nice refresher course for me to remember those subjects. Those students walked away from the summer school knowing so much. And they enjoyed learning because many of them did not have the opportunity to learn about these things in their undergrad programs, but were interested in working on something gravitational in grad school.
Anyhoo — yes, a summer institute in theoretical physics sounds like a great idea. Additional and/or complementary summer institutes in other fields of physics/astrophysics would also be great.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
I would have loved to have attended such a thing. As an undergrad more interested in theory than experiment, I nevertheless got involved in experimental research instead, for the same reasons that Sean stated. And I am rather grateful to my past self for having made that decision, because I find it inconceivable now that anyone can do science of any sort without knowing how the experimental process works in real life, and not as given by some abstract philosopher of science. However, I do find it rather frustrating that after being lured into physics by promises of the deep mathematical beauty and whatnot that lies beneath it, I don’t get to taste any of it as an undergrad. Well, almost none anyway — a mathematical physics course taught by a theorist this quarter is making up for some of that lack, but only after two years of mind-numbing courses that were no more than drills in how to do calculations.
January 12th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
First: The term “learning curve” originally referred to a plot showing skill at a task versus level of experience with that task. Those two quantities could be measured in many different ways, but the point of the curve was to measure how much practice or training improved a person’s (or, just as frequently in research situations, an animal’s) facility in doing something.
A “learning curve” in the original sense was something that one could draw on a piece of graph paper, and it had a definite mathematical meaning. Moreover, it did not measure in any way the difficulty over time of a course of study. However, the term has been reinterpreted in popular use, and to say something has a “steep learning curve” is an idiom meaning that the material gets difficult relatively quickly. However, different people still use the term to mean slightly different things. Since the idiomatic usage is not based on any real mathematics, if one tried to work backwards and figure out exactly what the term ought to mean, one can quickly get muddled.
On the actual subject of the post: I think this would be a nice idea. However, Sean’s proposed course of study is probably just too broad. I have always advocated that undergraduate physics students who are really interested in theory should take, alongside their physics classes, a heavy complement of mathematics classes. Courses in complex analysis, group theory, and probability are indispensable and can easily be fit into the first two or three years of undergraduate study. Analysis and partial differential equations also come in handy, but they are harder and less universal in their applicability. Understanding this material well can make the related topics in physics much easier when they finally appear.
Back on the subject of the proposed curriculum for Sean’s program, I would suggest striking out classical field theory, topological defects, and anything involving the Einstein’s equations in their general form. I have never, as a practicing field theorist, found a need for any classical field theory more advanced than that taught in sophomore-level linear mechanics classes. In fact, I would claim that any topic in quantum field theory that makes nontrivial reference to the real field character of the theory is a fairly advanced topic. Topological defects, interesting as they are, are strictly a special topic. Many theorists will never need to deal with them at all; and to treat them in any kind of general fashion requires a mathematical facility that many professors of theoretical physics lack. With the Einstein equations, the problem is that the equations and the general structure of geometrodynamics is so complicated that it’s almost impossible for a beginning student to digest what’s going on with them without immediately restricting oneself to very special cases. However, since almost all the interesting physics involves such special cases or small perturbations around them, it’s better just to zip through the generalities and get to something simpler, like the Friedmann equation or the linearized Einstein equations.
January 12th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
I would go!!!!
January 13th, 2007 at 10:44 am
I think what you are proposing is essentially a summer semester of undergraduate study… with a pretty heavy courseload.
But, if this scheme might help, we have an REU program here at WSU where we usually have about one theory student per year (out of total 10, sometimes more, sometimes less). What we do is that we have a one-credit REU-preparation course for our students in the winter semester PRECEEDING the summer program. We lecture on the basics of particle and nuclear physics, computing, and basic experimental techniques. This ensures that the summer program is not just another semester of learkning, but truly is a research experience. Theory student(s) usually sit with the rest of the students, but brush up additionally on what they would be doing in the summer.
I had students doing projects on heavy quarkonium, as there is nice connection to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. And the results are publishable… and the students do all the problems on their own…
January 13th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Currently, I’m a grad student in GR. In my undergrad research, I developed cosmic ray detectors. It was — as you point out — a useful introduction to independent research. However, I might have become an experimentalist if that was all I had seen.
One summer in undergrad, a couple friends and I got together and convinced Bob Wald to help us go through his General Relativity. We’d meet with him to ask him to clarify certain issues; he’d answer our questions and assign us problems from the book. We would then spend a couple nights reading what we needed to answer the problems, and work through them. Wald was adamant about not preparing lectures, so we were forced to think for ourselves, and dig on our own.
I think we not only made great progress in understanding GR for ourselves, but also got a taste for something closer to theoretical research. It wasn’t new to the world, but it was new to us.
You can cover the topics you list in a summer (maybe not with every undergrad, but with many), you will spark interest in pursuing theory as a career, and you will give those future theorists a much-needed leg up.
Maybe you don’t need a big, formal program to help out. Plus, it might not take as much work from you old folks as you think.
January 13th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
A summer institute like this for future theorists sounds like a wonderful idea, and would make me a bit jealous. When my brother was an undergraduate in physics, many years ago, he was able to spend summers doing interesting research projects. As an undergraduate in math, I had no interesting opportunities of any kind. At that time, there wasn’t even a concept of undergraduate research, except perhaps for the senior honors thesis. And I always thought it peculiar, because back then there were more summer activities for high school students! I spent two summers, one at Notre Dame and another at Berkeley, in NSF sponsored math programs when I was in high school. I agree with Sean that the summer between Junior and Senior years is ideal for some accelerated look-ahead learning.
January 14th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Dude, if you really want to push this, I’ll work with you on it. It could be an excellent “summer school” proposal.
All of that being said… before a certain age, many people don’t realize that they aren’t theorists. Like, say, me for example. I’ve anecdotally observed that the fraction of incoming Physics grad students who think that they want to do theory is much larger than the fraction who graduate that way. This may be changing as undergraduate research becomes more ubiquitous; when you’ve spent most/all of your time on classes, it’s easier to visualize theory (even if incorrectly) than it is experiment. (Esp. since lab classes tend to be lame more often than classroom classes do.) We really should be encouraging undergrads to get experimental research experience.
But, yes, also letting them have the opportunity for theory research experience is great, particularly if we can make sure that it doesn’t suck all of the student market away from the experimentalists.
I haven’t read the other 30 comments, just your article, but there is a whole big category missing from your topics : computational physics. A LOT of theory is simulation/computer based, but students are coming into graduate school much more computer illiterate than they did 10-20 years ago. This may sound surprising, since by and large they are more comfortable with comptuers, and have been using them longer. However, 10-20 years ago, being computer literate meant understanding filesystems and knowing how to program. Now, being computer literate means knowing the web and knowing instant messenger. Some rare students know how to use a spreadsheet or Mathematica. Very, very, very few know any real programming, and it’s a HUGE barrier for theorists and experimentalists alike.
-Rob
January 14th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Rob,
I’m surprised to hear that most entering physics grad students don’t know how to program. I’m an undergrad at Chicago and most undergrads here participate in experimental research, which almost inevitably involves some form of programming (especially in particle physics and astrophysics), so most people learn programming one way or another (there’s also a computational physics course for undergrads). And I’m astonished that there are people who don’t know how to use spreadsheets. Doesn’t everyone use spreadsheets to store and analyze data in lab courses?
January 14th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Almost all of the physics undergrads I knew at the ol’ trade school had some amount of practical programming experience. We skipped out on the programming classes taught by the CS department, so most of us couldn’t program a Scheme interpreter in Scheme, but everybody seemed to have a pretty good handle on MATLAB, maybe Perl and/or Python, and possibly C/C++. I learned microcontroller assembly language while working on a rather elaborate hat (to be worn at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies), but soon forgot it after that.
We picked up these skills mostly during experimental work, either in our “Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programs” (UROPs) or in Junior Lab. (One of my biggest gripes about my undergrad education is that the Physics Department filled sophomore year with marshmallow fluff while making junior year almost impossibly hard, and not even hard in a useful way. The rationale I’ve heard professors give is that junior year — where you hit the real stuff in quantum mechanics along with a lab class that takes twenty hours per week, bare minimum — is supposed to separate the “sheep from the wolves”. Having survived it, I can agree with that idea, more easily than I could while I was going through it. Still, it seems wrong-headed: much of Junior Lab’s difficulty comes from having to learn so many disparate things at once. Not only do you have to learn the physics involved, but at the same time you have to learn how experimental errors and data-analysis statistics work, pick up MATLAB and LaTeX skills, learn how to write a paper, learn how to give a presentation. . . . Why not work these ancillary skills into a more moderate lab class sophomore year, integrated with the waves/optics class, so the students can learn the practical skills they need and spend more time the following year being frustrated by the actual physics. Oh, and bring Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics back into the sophomore classes! Yes, you can get a physics degree from MIT without having integrated an action, save for a couple homework problems in 8.033 and the cramming everyone does before the GRE. Rant concluded.)
I’d also love to work on course material for this. Keep us all posted, please!
January 15th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Sean,
Your idea is great, but it’s limited by the traditional concept of “institute.” How about an online “theory institute” that wouldn’t be limited to a spatial or temporal location? First, judging from the sample input of these comments, you would have many, many more resources to draw upon. Second, given this same sample of responses, you would have many, many more participants willing and able to take advantage of the offering.
With a little help from your friends, you could hold live online video sessions (at very little cost) where you could play the coveted role of “father figure,” and “shoot the breeze with the students at the late-night coffee and whisky hours.” In fact, these could be held with local participants, with real coffee and whiskey, while virtual lurkers listened in the background, offering the occasional observation or even driving the conversation betimes, by asking questions.
If you pulled this off, you would be breaking new ground in education and probably be featured in the NYT, for instituting important social innovation. Finally, and maybe most importantly, I, for one, would be willing to pay a reasonable fee to join such a pioneering effort, even if I had to do it more than once to master the material.
January 15th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Sean,
I did research as an undergrad starting in my freshman year, spent a summer with an experimental group at Fermilab, got my name on a published atomic/nuclear theory paper junior year, and went into theory. So I believe that ug theory work is possible and desirable.
That having been said, your proposal doesn’t seem to me to be the most effective means of getting undergrads to make worthwhile contributions to theory. The main obstacle to undergrad to contribution is not the lack of easily accessible textbook knowledge of the sort you intend to dispense. It is the obscure lore, the nowhere-defined-but-everywhere-used terms, the unspoken connections that are assume to be obvious but aren’t.
When I was an undergrad, I often dreamed of something like 1-800-Ask-A-Physicist (no Internet to speak of during my ug years) to help me out during my desperate struggles to master issues at 2:00 am.
I think that http://www.ask-the-theoretical-physicist.org, accessible only to undergrad registrants, would be more useful. The FAQ compiled from such a site would, I believe, be far more valuable than the textbook knowledge that you propose to dish out.
January 15th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
While I’m not enthusiastic about an online “institute” because its hard to deal with equations efficiently, I think, in general trying to do something “bigger” then a physical program is a bad idea. There are right now plenty of sites where physics students congregate, be it chat rooms or forums, but they all are too big to keep track of most of the discussions without spending all of your time on them. Worse, the quality of posts varies enough that you can’t even be sure that the information is half-accurate. While others may have differing opinions, I don’t want to watch an impersonal video online or read some chat; that, for the most part, is doable now for many subjects. Its inevitable that any online system will accumulate enough users that it won’t be worth it to use for anything more then video lectures or socialization. There is a reason that collaboration is most efficient in person, and moving online seems like a disastrously bad idea. Technology does not always make ideas better.
January 15th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
I agree with G. There is no substitute for direct interpersonal contact with instructors and peers. The professions of physics or math is, despite the impressions of some, are very much a social activity, and the earlier students are involved the better. It helps build confidence and helps the student answer this question before they apply for and get into grad school: is this where I want to be?
January 15th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
There are always pros and cons to every approach, whether it’s research or education. However, the key to success is always to minimize the cons and maximize the pros in any given effort. One of the biggest cons to an online “institute” used to be the lack of adequate technology and the associated expense of dealing with that challenge. That’s no longer a problem, but its inverse is: the technology is so ubiquitous and the expense so negligible that too many unqualified participants can easily swamp the system.
However, the pros of the online “institute” are plainly manifest, since it enables many to benefit who couldn’t otherwise. I think the challenge is to properly characterize and manage the desired participation. Clearly, haphazard participation in large, unstructured, chat rooms or online forums, is not the way to characterize the online participation at the proposed tute.
What is wanted is a careful, deliberate, response to the prepared lectures. Such response could be managed in different ways, both to minimize the effort of instructors, and to maximize the learning process. I have some ideas along that line that might be helpful at some point.
Of course, the ideal participation, is, and always will be, an active, personal presence, but since one doesn’t have to preclude the other, I think the combination of both is the best of all possible worlds. The reality shows of television, as much as I loathe them, provide an excellent example of the access that technology can provide. Uncontrolled online access to the persons present would clearly not be desirable, but periodic access, after the fact and at appropriate times, would be immensely helpful to so many, as Belizean points out:
The main obstacle to undergrad to contribution is not the lack of easily accessible textbook knowledge of the sort you intend to dispense. It is the obscure lore, the nowhere-defined-but-everywhere-used terms, the unspoken connections that are assume to be obvious but aren’t.
But it’s the discussion of the textbook knowledge that brings these things out. As Belizean wrote:
When I was an undergrad, I often dreamed of something like 1-800-Ask-A-Physicist (no Internet to speak of during my ug years) to help me out during my desperate struggles to master issues at 2:00 am.
If I recall correctly, there’s an instance in the Feynman Lectures, where he explains something about differentiating and then adds, “I don’t know why they don’t teach this in school, but they don’t.” What a wonderful reality show his lecture series and associated confabs with students would have made.
January 16th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
This sounds like a great idea!
I had the oportunity to participate in two summer programs in famous national labs. Having read books like Kaku’s Hyperspace and Greene’s The elegant universe, I was (and still am) in love with all the “fancy” ideas like superstring theory. Of course, my research experience in these labs served to discover more things, things that I did not thought about.
When I found myself building an apparatus for single-molecule microscopy, I learned that not everything is written in index notation
. I really did not cared much about that project, but my mentor was able to present her field of study as alive and attractive. It was a physicist, working with chemists, biologists and one psychiatrist. It was more like a science thing than a just plain physics thing. I liked this about my first summer, most of the good stuff came as simple things like sitting down in real, formal discussions in the lab and even meeting a person who attended the Feynman lectures. (Not to mentioned the embarrassment of being asked hard questions by a Nobel Laureate during my final presentation). I did not had much “theory”, but overall I was happy that I got to see another side of things (I do not want to say another side of physics…).
During the second summer, the physics content was better in the sense that I was able to build samples and present real results. I got the experience of one full day at the beamline (with lack of lunch included…). Still, all of this was far from strings and fields. I agree with Sean, students that are interested in theoretical topics should still try these research experiences. They serve to learn about new, different things and meet all kind of people (I met my current girlfriend in one…).
When I applied to graduate school, I guess both my research experinced made belive the committee thought I was going to follow experimental physics and I believe they were surprised to learn of my interest in string theory. I am currently working my way through my first year and so far so good. So Sean, if you need some henchmens, tell me and I would gladly help with gruntwork, like note-typing, etc.
January 28th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Why not just require the students to read “The Road to Reality” as a prerequisite (including doing all the exercises of at least medium difficulty)? That would at least get them familiar with the basic terminology and concepts of GR and QFT, and leave more time for the kind of material that can’t be readily absorbed through self-study.