Prominent research physicist Sid Nagel writes about the fragmentation of physics, but does not include the growing separation between physics and physics education.
Over the past 30 years, the American Association of Physics Teachers, once a society of physicists interested in teaching, has become largely a society of educators interested in physics. The number of AAPT members who are research physicists has declined while the number of physicists from high schools and two-year colleges has increased.
On past occasions, top physicists like Ed Purcell and I. I. Rabi could be seen at AAPT meetings. Now, noted research physicists rarely come to a meeting unless they are being honored and asked to give an invited talk. And the joint AAPT/American Physical Society meetings that brought research physicists and physics educators together are no more.
The 2002 conference of the International Research Group on Physics Teaching (GIREP) in Sweden, with a thoroughly international group of participants, had as a theme the flight from physics. Physics enrollments and degrees are down in most countries, and not one research physicist of note was among the 400 conference participants.
The undergraduate physics curriculum once united physicists. We bragged that, unlike the chemists, any physicist could teach any undergraduate physics course. The knowledge base provided by the undergraduate curriculum gave physicists in all research areas the ability to move from their frontier research position, take a few steps back toward that base, and find common ground with physicists in other specialties. That ability is no longer available. The chain of logic from a specialty back to a common base is too long. So we do not talk to each other—hence Nagel’s crisis.
My introductory physics text of the 1950s, Sears and Zemansky (Addison-Wesley, 1955), is a black-and-white version of current physics textbooks. My introductory texts in chemistry and biology, however, bear no resemblance to current textbooks in those fields. Students are introduced to chemistry and biology in ways that represent the disciplines as they are today. Physicists, though, introduce students to their discipline as they did 50 years ago. Yet look at how physics has changed.
If we reform the structure and content of undergraduate physics to represent more accurately what contemporary research physicists do, we might establish a new knowledge base that would provide common ground for our discipline. Then, perhaps, we could talk to each other once again.
