The Spacetime Metric
Monday, May 14, 2007
spherical harmonics
It's hard to become a physicist. If it were easy, everyone would do it. You have to take several years of math- and understand it almost viscerally- plus many years of required and then specialized physics courses, and then everything else. The "everything else" is the easy part; there's a popular list entitled "You Know You're a Physics Major If..." which contains the entry: "You consider any non-science course 'easy.'"
In order to reverse the contemporary downward spiral of physics knowledge, we need more physics majors. We need physicists who can tell the difference between string theory and everything else, between science and pseudo-scientific fads (like global warming theories). The "problem", the trouble with physics, is that there aren't enough of us, not that there are too many of us.
There's a shortage of people with any technical knowledge, but physicists have been hit the hardest. Graduate students are being forced to work long hours at CERN; even the largest physics lab in the world has had its share of problems. I hope the LHC's startup date doesn't get pushed until next year. With all of the problems in experimental (not to mention theoretical) physics, many physicists are advising their students to leave the field. And I'm afraid a lot of them will.
The future physicists who remain will need support. Not only financial support from NSF grants, but support from people who know what they're talking about. People who know that R(nl)Y(lm) is not only a solution to a spherical-coordinate PDE, but a wavefunction... for example. (R is proportional to r^l, where l is the quantum number corresponding to s, p, d, f, etc. Y(lm) is a Legendre function with a somewhat complicated generating formula. For example, Y(00), which has l=m=0, is (1/4*pi)^1/2.) The general public needs more than an extremely vague knowledge of what physics is.
I was the first student from my high school (at least in the last five years) who took a year of quantum physics. That should not have happened. Knowledge of advanced physics is becoming scarce, and I hope scientists never actually reach the point- asymptotically or not- where no one can understand each other. ¶ 2:48 PM 3 comments
In order to reverse the contemporary downward spiral of physics knowledge, we need more physics majors. We need physicists who can tell the difference between string theory and everything else, between science and pseudo-scientific fads (like global warming theories). The "problem", the trouble with physics, is that there aren't enough of us, not that there are too many of us.
There's a shortage of people with any technical knowledge, but physicists have been hit the hardest. Graduate students are being forced to work long hours at CERN; even the largest physics lab in the world has had its share of problems. I hope the LHC's startup date doesn't get pushed until next year. With all of the problems in experimental (not to mention theoretical) physics, many physicists are advising their students to leave the field. And I'm afraid a lot of them will.
The future physicists who remain will need support. Not only financial support from NSF grants, but support from people who know what they're talking about. People who know that R(nl)Y(lm) is not only a solution to a spherical-coordinate PDE, but a wavefunction... for example. (R is proportional to r^l, where l is the quantum number corresponding to s, p, d, f, etc. Y(lm) is a Legendre function with a somewhat complicated generating formula. For example, Y(00), which has l=m=0, is (1/4*pi)^1/2.) The general public needs more than an extremely vague knowledge of what physics is.
I was the first student from my high school (at least in the last five years) who took a year of quantum physics. That should not have happened. Knowledge of advanced physics is becoming scarce, and I hope scientists never actually reach the point- asymptotically or not- where no one can understand each other. ¶ 2:48 PM 3 comments
