Physics for Non-Majors

Yesterday I met Serge Haroche, the 2012 Nobel Prize winner in physics. While Prof. Haroche wasn’t the first Nobel laureate I had met in my time at the University of Chicago, he was definitely very impressive and in many ways rather inspiring. What got me the most about the way he interacted with undergraduates during our very casual breakfast event was definitely the fact that despite having benefited from the current academic and scientific system he was very openly critical of it and supportive of others’ being, if nothing else, skeptical of the ways in which scientific funding or application processes for tenured positions work. The rather capitalistic model in which science is only funded for the short term, where every project has to meet certain milestones; the way in which graduate students are often treated as interchangeable, passive, cheap labor; the pressure to publish obscurely-written papers in Science and Nature which are both owned by private companies rather than being regulated by a physics society of some sort; and the gender issue in physics were discussed in as much depth as our guest’s scientific achievements. And while all of these topics probably deserve a whole other set of discussions, the one thing that always seems remarkably relevant to me in these conversations is the fact that people that deal with funding or regulating science are barely ever scientists themselves. In other words, the financial and logistical setup of academic research today is heavily influenced by people who have never actually tried their hand at running an experiment or posing a potentially fruitful theoretical problem. Inevitably, this brings up the topic of what I’ve always referred to as ’science education for non-majors’ and what it can do in order to allow non-scientists in charge of funding scientific research to understand its processes well enough for the posing of a sustainable, fruitful system of regulation for it.

I’m always shocked to learn how often institutions actually do conduct research on science education and focus completely on optimizing the introductory major sequence rather than the classes that fall under the umbrella of general requirements. Though I am completely aware of the fact that I might be something of an elitist and that my background definitely puts me in a position of privilege over many, I still generally like to argue that most major oriented classes need to be in some sense self-selecting in order for those that emerge as graduating physics majors to have promising careers. At the same time, I would argue the exact opposite when it comes to non-major or general requirement classes - no-one should be able to opt out or sail through these classes. I always think of an anecdote one of the Chinese faculty members in our department tells us about being denied a visa because his project proposal included the word ‘atomic’. The administrator making a connection between an ultracold atomic experiment and the atomic bomb very likely didn’t receive very good science education and yet was allowed to decide on whether someone, who went on to be very successful, should be granted a work opportunity. Yet, thinking of a typical physics class in which all that is discussed are crates sliding down inclines, springs, and pendulums and in which all that is ever taught is how to plug numbers into equations that might not even work out every time, one shouldn’t be surprised to learn of mistakes as the one described above. Science education that goes beyond this approach seems to be rather necessary.

Another thing that inevitably comes to mind is the fact that I once took a whole course on the history and sociology of science and medicine and all I learned was that not even highly educated sociologists have a very good picture of how science is done on a day to day basis. A professors teaching this course routinely spoke about the scientific method, falsifiability, and bias against publishing certain results, while at the same time claiming that results found in laboratories didn’t actually map to the real world, criticizing ‘big science’ like the LHC and LIGO from the perspective of someone that had only ever read about these things in the newspapers, and very consistently claiming that too much money was being spent in all of the big endeavors of physics today that did not immediately shatter the current paradigm. The two other physics majors in the class and myself rolled our eyes for ten weeks and put a lot of effort into subverting the given essay prompts but it is reasonable to assume that most of the other history or sociology students retained quite a bit of this sentiment. The irony here is that these people will likely be the ones with more power over scientific research than those of us hoping to pursue an academic career in it. This sort of perspective combined with likely boredom and utter confusion in any general requirements course can only work to convince non-scientists that science is either not trustworthy or obscure or, most horrifyingly, that it should be treated as any other capitalistic business endeavor.

The natural question is then that of what can we do about it and why haven’t we done that already? As far as the first point I imagine that teaching less classical mechanics brute-force plug-and-chug problems and more conceptually interesting, historically important examples could do wonders for changing laymen’s attitude about physics in general. Crates sliding down inclines are really not interesting at all and without the drive to see what comes next, a drive that generally only physics major students are bound to have, I cannot possibly see why learning about them would be a pleasant memory for a future senator or a congressperson. Recreating an experiment proving that electrons have spin and debating implications of a two-state system for quantum computing ought to be much more fulfilling even if some of the mathematical formalism and rigor is left out. The lack of modern topics in many curricula seems to make people think that research has never quite gotten beyond Einstein and Heisenberg which was by now more than 80 years ago! An ideal physics class for non-majors, as I imagine it, would also include a discussion session with real academic scientists and lots and lots of talk about where funding comes from, how projects are justified, and how an academic scientists deals with the logistics of their work on a day to day basis. Real scientists live nothing like the crew on the “Big Bang Theory,” nor is obtaining grant money as easy as getting a salary at, say, an office job. As to why classes like this do not exist and why classes taught on science by social scientists miss the mark so readily is something of a mystery to me. It is a fact that academic scientists generally try to do research and nothing else ever but that, in a lot of ways, seems like a consequence of the way the system is currently set up. At the same time, scientists who are deeply invested in thinking about science education and the ways in which the scientific community interacts with the public definitely seem to exist and what they seem to be lacking is some sort of a platform. 

While the solution to this problem is not even remotely clear to me, I do firmly believe that it is important for young scientists who are already caught up in social media to take advantage of it in order to try and implement at least some minor, gradual change in the way others perceive science. We can’t all hold the social capital of a Nobel laureate but anyone can yell on Tumblr.