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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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?

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