Skip to main content
Education and outreach

Education and outreach

Putting the fizz back into physics

01 Sep 1998

Physics students come to university full of glamorous ideas about studying topics like quarks, quasars and black holes. So why are first-year courses so boring, asks Conor Henderson.

The fascination of physics, for me, lies in its supremely exotic nature. Although it is a subject grounded in experimental test and rigorous verification, it nonetheless spans an awesome range of weird and wonderful concepts. The power of physics to describe the real world is persuasive, but it is its power to describe other worlds beyond our normal experience – worlds of antimatter and of hyperspace, of dilated time and infinite possibility – that is most potent.

At least, that’s how I see it. And I’m far from alone. According to a recent survey by the UK’s Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, it is precisely these areas of so-called “sexy physics” – cosmology, chaos, elementary particles and the like – that attract most undergraduate physics students to the subject.

So we arrive at university with these delirious visions in our heads of learning about quarks, quanta and quasars; about black holes and dark matter, white dwarfs and red giants; about superstrings, supernovae and the mystery of Schrödinger’s cat. But, of course, what our first-year physics lectures actually cover are things like oscillations, wave mechanics, magnetic and dielectric properties of matter, the kinetic theory of gases, the laws of thermodynamics and so on.

Now, these topics are obviously all essential components of an introductory course in physics – it would be impossible to go on to study, for example, quantum mechanics without first having done wave equations – and I am not for a moment suggesting that there is anything wrong with teaching them. The problem is that while these things are not exactly boring, they are not really all that exciting either, especially when compared with the glamorous topics we had in mind.

This clash between the quite mundane reality of first-year university physics and the glorious wonders we students had anticipated can have major repercussions. To use an astrophysical analogy, it is rather like a star about to go supernova: the actual course content is the inner core, while our great expectation of the subject is the unstable outer envelope – collapsing rapidly onto the core and generating a shock wave that can have catastrophic consequences.

Dull and dreary

I know of many students who started doing physics but then changed courses, so disillusioned had they become with the subject. I should stress that these people were not just “dossers”, who dropped out because they found the going too tough. They were bright students who could have made a contribution to the discipline. But the disappointment they experienced on seeing that the physics course did not match up to their expectations made them susceptible to the lure of other subjects, which seemed to promise the intellectual thrills they were seeking.

This is a great loss for physics. The intelligence and enthusiasm of these students were available for the subject to harness, yet these valuable commodities were thrown away by the solid but dull content of the first-year syllabus.

Less drastic than the drop-out cases, but almost as serious, is the number of remaining students who are drained of all of their enthusiasm for physics by their first-year experiences. Enthusiasm is a bit like virginity – once it’s been lost, it’s difficult to get back. These students are doomed to drag themselves through the rest of their degree courses without ever again really appreciating those imaginative qualities of physics that had once so attracted them.

This whole scenario of dropping out or just switching off seems even more unfortunate when one considers that the expectations-versus-reality conflict is largely a phenomenon specific to the first year of courses.

I chose to persevere with physics, despite the reservations induced by the culture clash I have just described, and I have found that in subsequent years the situation improved immensely. The second and third years generally offer a wider choice of modules along with deeper content, so I have at last been able to study those fascinating fields that attracted me to physics in the first place. The experimental side of the subject also improves over the duration of a degree course. There is quite a rapid progression from the basic (and often boring) practicals at introductory level to the research-orientated projects in the advanced stages. This too helps stimulate the interest of the students who stick with physics despite the initial setbacks.

Mind-bending changes

So a physics degree definitely does contain the exciting elements we had anticipated. The trouble is, there’s little or no indication of this in the first year. There is no doubt that this has to change. But how?

The most immediate thing that can be done is to simply place more emphasis on those topics already in the syllabus that do have the potential to be inspiring. A good instance of this is special relativity. Einstein’s theory is a truly mind-bending concept, which requires us to completely abandon our common-sense notions of time and space. But precisely because it is so challenging, this aspect of the theory is often merely glossed over, in favour of a more mathematical treatment.

Yet this is neglecting the very thing that makes the theory so exciting. Surely students would be stimulated more if they were given the chance to ponder such strange concepts as time dilation and the twin paradox? Quantum mechanics could similarly be treated in a more exciting manner, by describing and comparing the many different physical interpretations of what the theory “really means”. In this way, the true mystique of the subject could be revealed.

Physics at the frontier

To properly solve the problem, however, more radical action is needed. I suggest setting up a new course of “frontier physics”, which would be taken along with the main first-year physics courses, and which would contribute perhaps 10-20% of the yearly assessment. As the name implies, frontier physics would cover areas at the cutting edge of modern physics – the topics that have been demonstrated to particularly attract students to the discipline. The emphasis throughout would be on understanding the physical principles involved, rather than any detailed mathematics.

The course would be taught as a combination of lectures – some of which could be given by visiting experts in the field, since such events usually generate plenty of interest – and prescribed reading. Many excellent popular science books are now available that describe these areas of physics very well and do not require the reader to have too much mathematical knowledge. These books would be perfect background for this kind of course.

Students would then choose from this course a couple of topics on which to write short essays. This would give them the opportunity to learn more about the things that particularly interest them, while at the same time developing invaluable research and communication skills. Frontier physics would, I believe, go a long way towards bridging the gap between what first-year physics students expect and what they actually get.

However, this is just one idea as to what I, as a student, would like to have done in my first year. There are probably other ways of tackling the problem. But the important point is to recognize that there is indeed a problem, which must be solved if our subject is to continue to attract bright, keen students. We have to find some way of putting the “fizz” back into physics.

Copyright © 2024 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors