INTER ACTIONS 1997

Undergraduate Physics Curriculum

By Reinhard Schumacher

Reinhard Schumacher chairs the undergraduate curriculum committee. His research is in the area of experimental medium energy physics.

Every former and present undergraduate physics student remembers the experience of getting an official Course Catalog and looking up the curricular requirements for his or her major field. There were required courses in physics, required courses in related areas such as math, chemistry and perhaps biology, elective courses in physics and other technical fields, and finally an array of distribution courses in outside areas such the humanities. More often than not, students find the requirements and options confusing and daunting at first, but accept them as simply part of the given university academic system. Who makes up all these rules and requirements? Do they ever change, and if so, for what reasons?

The Physics Department has an Undergraduate Curriculum Committee whose task is to monitor how our curriculum meets our educational goals, and to consider how the undergraduate academic experience might be improved. This group is responsible for maintaining the flow and continuity of the sequence of courses our majors take, against a shifting landscape of university mandates, available teaching manpower and student interests. Within the past three years the most important changes we instituted resulted from a university-wide change in policy concerning the Introductory physics courses. In the near future, the main anticipated change will be the addition of new astrophysics courses.

Consider how the seemingly immutable curriculum experienced by undergraduates is actually quite fluid when viewed on a timescale of more than four years. In 1994 the engineering college reduced the number of physics courses taken by engineering students from three to two. A year later the science college followed suit. This upset a long-standing sequence of three courses offered by the department: Physics I (Newtonian mechanics including rotations and angular momentum), Physics II (waves, vibrations and optics for half the semester and thermodynamics for the other half) and Physics III (electricity and magnetism up to Maxwell's Equations). We had to devise a pair of two-semester sequences for the engineering and the science students which in some way covered the ground previously covered in three semesters. The "third" course would be required only for physics majors. Note that in former times, more than 20 years ago, all students took four semesters of introductory physics how times have changed. The challenge was to determine what the content of the new courses should be, such that the non-physics majors would receive respectable introduction to the subject, while the physics majors would reach a level of understanding sufficient to undertake their intermediate level courses.

We agreed not to simply compress three semesters of physics into two. Some topics, agonizingly, would have to be deleted from the old sequence. We wanted a third course for physics majors that would not just fill in topics omitted from the first two courses, but give these sophomores a first look at 20th-century physics. A great deal of discussion followed, since everyone on the committee, not to mention every other faculty member in the department, had his or her own ideas about what the introductory sequence should contain. Starting in the fall of 1996 we fully implemented the results of our efforts. Physics I now treats basic Newtonian Mechanics plus several weeks of thermal physics. Physics II is now mostly electricity and magnetism, as well as a few weeks of wave motion. Both of these courses exist in versions for the science students and for the engineering students. While their syllabi are very similar, instructors are free to make adjustments according to which group they are addressing.

Physics III received the largest make-over in this process. Subtitled "Modern Essentials," the new course consists of Special Relativity and early quantum phenomenology, finishing with the Schroedinger equation. The virtue of teaching SR to sophomores is that it challenges people's conceptions of space and time, but in a context that can be kept mathematically simple; we find that this approach captures and holds people's interest. The virtue of bringing quantum physics into the curriculum early is similarly to give young students a chance to deal with non-classical, initially non-intuitive, topics early enough to keep their interest in the subject high. Our response to this course offering has been very good. Although only required for physics majors, over half the enrollment in each semester has come from other areas of the university.

To compensate for the loss of several topics in the introductory mechanics course, we made another adjustment in the early curriculum, adding a course to be taken in parallel with the Modern Essentials course. Called Physics Analysis, this course deals with simple harmonic motion, using it as a vehicle for solving the relevant differential equation in many different contexts. We introduce numerical modeling and symbolic manipulation using the Maple computer program. Thus the physics majors still have four courses at the introductory level to prepare for their intermediate level course, just as in former times.

In the next two years more changes will likely occur in our curriculum. Our strong new Astrophysics group will introduce two new courses at the introductory level: one is an introductory astronomy course for all students, including non-technical students, while the other is an experimental astronomy course for technical students who wish to learn the craft of using astronomical equipment. We believe there is large pent-up demand for courses of this kind at Carnegie Mellon. The undergraduate curriculum in physics is hardly a static entity. The department is continually looking for ways to better serve the needs of its students.

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