When I first took physics, as a high-school senior toward the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency, I was part of a select minority. As near as I can make it, in any given year only a few percent of the students in my Los Angeles high school studied the subject. My school had but one physics teacher, even though roughly 3,000 students set foot in the place on any given day - an enrollment far greater than that of my eventual grad school, Caltech, with its four-dozen-plus physics professors!
Fast-forward to 2009. Now I teach in a school with about 1,100 students, and there are three full-time physics teachers on staff. Something like 90 percent of the students at Winchester High take physics, and many of the others take a physical-science course that gives them an overview of Newtonian mechanics.
In fact, a recent study estimated that one million high-school students were on track to take physics in the United States annually (as of the 2005-06 school year). Meanwhile, physics enrollments have exploded across college campuses nationwide. What's going on?
"Well, in order to compete economically, our nation needs many more scientists and engineers; so schools and colleges are adapting in order to meet that need."
That's what I would've thought a few years back. However, according to Jack Hehn and Michael Neuschatz, "Much of the increase comes from nontraditional courses geared toward students not headed for careers in science and technology" (Physics Today, February 2006). Conceptual Physics; Physics for Poets; Physics for Liberal Arts - the list of concepts and course titles highlights this trend. Physics isn't just for scientists anymore.
Of course, the same can - and should - be said about chemistry, biology, and many other scientific subjects. But if there's one science class that people my age and above almost always say they hated, it's physics. Why? In the Cold-War, Space-Race world that baby boomers grew up in, physics was the "weed-out" course, a curricular boot camp designed to separate those who might have the technical chops to send men to Mars from the rest of humanity. (It also effectively excluded women and people of color, regardless of their potential: take a look at the mug shots of the aforementioned Caltech physics faculty to see the era's demographic echoes.)
This is a tragedy. Not only because it compromises our nation's economic competitiveness (our graduate schools are full of foreign-born students who earn their Ph.D.'s at U.S. taxpayer expense and then go on to found dynamic companies, often on our shores but increasingly back home), but also because it is our birthright to know how science has transformed our lives, our culture, our language, even our dreams. If no one's education is complete without the Gettysburg Address; without King Lear; without "I Have a Dream"; without Catcher in the Rye; it likewise is incomplete without:
- bookbinder Michael Faraday, a self-taught physicist, discovering the basis for generating electrical power;
- Galileo Galilei finding, in the phases of Venus, convincing evidence for a Sun-centered cosmos;
- Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins elucidating the structure of DNA;
- and Albert Einstein warning Franklin D. Roosevelt of the possibility that Germany might develop and deploy what we now call the atom bomb.
Most of all, no one's education is complete without first-person, hands-on experiences that allow one to rediscover how falling bodies accelerate, how electric charges can be separated and put to work, how the chemical makeup of distant stars (and now, their planets) can be read with telescopes and prisms - and, most of all, how the language of mathematics eerily imitates the behavior of the physical world. Not only has our very planet been transformed by the power, for good and ill, that physics has given us; our culture, too, has been transformed by this power. And making first-person contact with the very human source of this power is everyone's birthright.
P.S. History buffs, take note: The Truman Archives contain PDF versions of many documents, starting with Einstein's letter, that trace the development and deployment of the atom bomb.
Copyright 2009 Joshua Roth.