Physics – Physics Education
Scientific paper
Mar 1999
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999phyed..34...51c&link_type=abstract
Physics Education, Volume 34, Issue 2, pp. 51 (1999).
Physics
Physics Education
Scientific paper
Why are the `popular science' shelves of our bookshops groaning under the weight of the numerous books on cosmology, the quantum world, the fundamental particle zoo and similar topics both mysterious and esoteric? The answer is obvious, of course - because there's a market out there. A sizeable proportion of the avid readers are no doubt bright young people eager to read about the wonders of science, or in this case physics, and be awed (overawed?) by the strange behaviour of matter and energy on scales unimaginably larger or smaller than ourselves.
Good thing too, you might say. I agree - at least to the extent that this particular readership is excited and enthused by these popular tracts to study physics at A-level and perhaps beyond. Maybe not so good though, if the result is that some youngsters are turned off physics because it comes over as `OK for the bright ones but too difficult for me'. Cosmological and high energy physics is very difficult, and it's not just a matter of the mathematical skills that one needs to make any serious headway. The concepts involved are, to say the least, strange and counter-intuitive. This is great for triggering scientific curiosity and the excitement of physics, but how typical are they of the problems and challenges faced by the large majority of professional physicists, in industry, government research labs or, indeed, in academia? And how characteristic of the flavours of physics that the average A-level student or undergraduate will encounter?
Recent correspondence in Physics World indicates that our undergraduate physics programmes are on the whole disappointingly bland compared with the expectations of graduates seduced, perhaps, by glimpses of quarks, superstrings and black holes. My argument is not that we shouldn't sell physics in this way, but that we could try to provide a more balanced sample of what physics is really about. Above all, we need to sell the idea - to the public at large as well as the potential physics undergraduate - that it is fundamentally important in our everyday lives.
It is `person-sized physics' (give or take a factor of 1010!) which lies behind the numerous items that make up our world today, among them PCs, mobile phones, video CDs, `intelligent' materials and the multifarious means for medical imaging. Can't we promote an interest in physics through popular books and articles on wonders such as these? Yes, such books do exist, but on the bookshop shelves you will find scant representation of this type of physics among the well-written and superbly presented `pop' books like those of Hawking, Gribbin and Davies.
Until recently I was a Deputy Editor of this journal. During the past few years we have published numerous `special issues' focusing on a specific topic. Those I have edited have reflected my philosophy, and have included issues on Laser Applications, Energy Update, and the Physics of the Body. Other editors have produced equally `applied' special issues. Might youngsters (or even an oldster) be equally excited by the elucidation of the mysteries of the quantum world in the context of, say, the silicon chip as by the world of the fundamental particle? Surely the glamour of physics-based state-of-the-art recording technology or the latest PC or sleek new aircraft or medical imaging technique can compete with the `wonders of space and time' exhaustively recycled in the popular literature?
Come on popular science authors! Try your hand at dressing up the physics of everyday life so that the excitement and immediate relevance of physics is displayed before the people - not least, the young people - in the street.
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