Mixing the Practical and the Scholarly in Physics Education

John Neumann’s letter calling for inclusion of fluid mechanics in the physics curriculum (Physics Today, June 2004, page 14) is quite interesting. I suggest, however, that mechanical engineers are generally better trained in computational methods than physicists are, and it is this training, rather than an academic course in fluid dynamics, which gives them an edge in applied problems.

I like the fundamental approach of the physics curriculum. In fact, I would argue for the reestablishment of professorships of natural philosophy and physics. Today’s graduate training seems to suffer from a fissure between course work on the one hand and, on the other, research in which professors and students are overly dependent on the tools of the trade—for example, canned computer codes for theoretical studies. That situation in turn leads to the stifling of really innovative and trenchant work.

Clearly there is a danger that an overemphasis on practical training and technical skills could shift the physics curriculum toward a course of study expected for a certificate from a vocational-technical institute rather than for a PhD from a major university. I have always found that the chemistry curriculum tends to have an orientation that emphasizes the practical rather than the scholarly, such that the poor physical chemist, for example, is offered no courses in optics, no classical or quantum electrodynamics, and just enough quantum mechanics so that the student can make sense of spectroscopy for chemical analysis. It seems to me that the American Chemical Society is minimalist in acknowledging the existence of quantum or theoretical chemistry, notwithstanding all the good theoretical work performed in chemistry departments roughly since the publication of the distinguished text in 1935 by Linus Pauling and E. Bright Wilson, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics: With Applications to Chemistry (McGraw-Hill).