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It has rained every day since my last post. It is even raining right now, even though last time I looked out the window, there was not a cloud in the sky. The pass over the mountains to Mendoza, on the way to Buenos Aires has been closed due to snow build-up since Sunday. We went to the terminal two mornings in a row and all they could tell us was to check back the next day. I don’t have a time limit, but Nathan ended up flying back to the States tonight, because there just wasn’t enought time for us to get over there, see something and get back. It does make a little bit more sense for me to travel all in one big push, rather than leaving and returning to Santiago many times. Speaking of which, I need to find a copy of Lonely Planet’s South America on a Shoestring somewhere. That book is awesome, but for someone who is supposed to be on a shoestring, $34 for a book isn’t cheap.

    The following is a rough draft of an essay I have been kicking around in my head, because of my extreme dissatisfaction with the instructional physics labs at uchicago. I want to say more, but it already seems longer than necessary and pretty repetitive. I honestly don’t think it’s going to go over too well with the people to whom I send it, so I would like to make the case as airtight and the presentation as brief as possible. This is probably one of those posts you want to skip unless you took a lot of physics at uchicago or are unhealthily curious about what I think about any topic. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

    As far as I am able to tell, the two appeals of experimental physics are building things and stumbling on unexpected results. I never built anything during the instructional labs, and I tried to ignore as many unexpected results as possible, since I knew that there was not enough time to explain them sufficiently and that any time I spent investigating them would only reduce the time I could spend on data taking and writing the report.

    I think the instructional labs at the University of Chicago are seriously broken and that thought needs to be given to the goals of having an instructional lab program and the best way to achieve those goals.

    Clearly, the practices of experimental physics differ among different sub-fields. The activities and techniques of a low-temperature solid-state experimenter are far from those of low-background particle physics, which are both different from those of high-energy physics. However, the instructional labs are remarkably similar to each other, even when the labs are associated with very different subjects. Usually, the students get the apparatus ready to take data, under the guidance of Mark, Van or a TA. This almost always nothing more than connecting wires, switching on components, or placing objects in a configuration prescribed in the lab manual. There is some discussion of the theory behind the experiment and the expected results. Then the students are left more or less alone to take the data. Taking the data usually consists of manipulating the knobs, switches, buttons of a piece of electronic equipment. This is less true of the earlier labs, where the equipment is more mechanical, and much less data is taken. Once all the appropriate data is taken, the students store it away to be analyzed. The analysis takes place using techniques that are only possible with specialized software on a computer. After or during the analysis, the student is expected to write about the theory, process, analysis, and results of the experiment, and it is solely on the basis of this analysis that the lab grade is assigned.

    The point of the proceeding description of the instruction labs is that they are very similar to each other. No reference was made to a specific course, only to the fact that labs are usually more mechanical and “hands-on” earlier in the program. Despite this similarity, my suggestions of changes to the lab program were usually criticized since they would reduce the number of experiments that each student was expected to do to complete the lab portion of a course. I presume that this criticism is related to an idea of “broad exposure” to the different areas of physics that the instructors would like each student to have before graduating. However, for the reasons I have given above. I don’t think that the instructional labs as they now stand impart this kind of broad exposure, since they do not expose the student to the aspects of different areas of experimental physics that really are substantively different. The aspect that I am referring to, which is totally missing in the instructional labs, is experimental design and construction. This is what separates the sub-fields of physics from each other. In order to understand something about the differences between these sub-fields, and perhaps even something about experimental physics as a whole, it is crucially necessary to be involved in the minutiae of experimental design and construction. This involvement requires a great deal of time, and drastically reduces the number of experiments a student is able to “perform” during the program. I propose that each student be required to do no more than four experiments during his or her entire study in the physics program, preferably under the guidance of and as part of the research program of a professor. It is not a coincidence that this one experiment per year of the average undergraduate tenure at the university. I think that being deeply involved in a single, real, modern, experiment over the course of a year is the most appropriate way to learn about the practice of doing them. This gives enough time to spend on the design, construction, data collection, analysis, and conclusions of an experiment.

    One might be tempted to make the following analogy: the lab courses as they are now are like reading a different book every two weeks, whereas my proposal is like spending a year on in-depth study of one book. This appears to cast the question in terms of depth vs. breadth of understanding. However, the analogy is not appropriate. The labs as they now stand are not complete books, they are partial ones, where the student starts close to the end. A better characterization of the labs as they are now would be that they are like reading the Cliff Notes and the final few chapters of a book every few weeks.

    I hope that the reader is convinced of the futility of attempting to give the instructional labs “breadth” by removing the crucial, time-consuming parts of experimentation. The question now becomes how to expose students to the real way experiments are done, and the answer is obvious. Students should spend as much time as possible engaged in real experiments - helping determine what questions are most important, what kind of apparatus will best help th e experimenter answer these questions, how data should be collected, and how it should be analyzed. In order learn about what experimental physicists do, students need to do exactly what physicists do, and there is not better way than under the close supervision of a physicist. If the goals of the instructional labs, as they have been explained to me by Van, are to be met, there should be no instructional labs separate from a real, working physics lab.

    Every student should be required to complete a number of hours as an intern in a physics lab equal to the time now spent on instruction labs. A grade can be assigned by the head of the lab for the year, or for each quarter if desired.

    I hope this is not news to any of my readers. What I find interesting is why it does not make sense, as illuminated by a comparison to Spanish. English is much easier than other languages in that the words in an English sentence have less to do grammatically to the other words. Nouns don’t have case or grammatical gender, and to put a verb in the past, you usually just add “ed”, regardless of the subject. This is different from Spanish and most romance languages, where the form of the word you are about to use depends sensitively on what you are going to use a few words later. So, the rules of English grammar are simple, but grammar alone doesn’t let you communicate. It’s when you try to fill in the grammar with something that you run into all these problems.

1. Pronunciation: Again, I hope this is not news to you. Just for fun, how many letters in the English alphabet never change their pronunciation? For example, “cough” and “through” are pronounced differently, so that knocks out o, u, g, and h.
2. Unnecessary Synonyms: This is the one I really want to talk about, because it’s such a good way to tell merely fluent speakers from native ones. As an example, what’s the difference in meaning between “write” and “write down”? I don’t think there is one, but there is certainly a difference in usage: you only say “write down” when someone is already trying to communicate through non-written means. No, wait. “Write down the names of your whole family on this sheet of paper” sounds perfectly natural. Is there one rule for which to use, and more importantly, why did anyone start using “write down” when it has no meaning separate from “write”? If you are a lot smarter than me and you thought of the answer without breaking a sweat, first let me know what the answer is, then try coming up with you own examples. Remember, it has to be two words or phrases, which mean exactly the same thing, but are used in different contexts, based on as subtle a rule of usage as possible. What about “many” and “a lot of”?

    I gave my first physics lecture today, at a little gathering where we were supposed to present preliminary results about our research. My talk went more or less fine, but the following questions kept interrupting my train of thought: “Why are all these people looking at me attentively? Why do I keep writing on a blackboard, gesturing at these graphs projected behind me, and saying things like ‘far from equilibrium’ and ‘adiabatic limit’? I am lecturing a roomful of people about physics. How did this come to be?” Of course, I can clearly remember being interested in physics in high school, deciding at St. John’s that I wanted to study it, registering for physics courses and declaring it as my major, as well as the events that brought me to Chile. But the feeling of being myself, doing what I was doing has rarely felt so strange. I am still not sure what the questions were trying to tell me. Does it mean that I am not cut out to lecture on physics? My presentation was far from perfect; I should have made better notes of the equations I needed to write and memorized the equations better as well so that I didn’t need to pause and look down so much. My graphs were pretty mediocre as well, but that’s not exactly career-ending. Maybe more than anything, it may have underscored just how hard it is to explain something publicly in a well-ordered way. In a bad lecture, I used to daydream about how to make the presentation better, but it’s a lot harder when you just have to keep saying something in order to keep your audience engaged. Now I am wondering when lecture number two will be so I can really do a good one.

    I am really churning out the updates here. I hope to finish some of this travelogue stuff, because I intended to write some thoughts about my life so far and upcoming, but I feel like these stories of recent events have to get written before I forget about them. Keep in mind that if I am writing about an event, I will post it under the day when it happened, not the day I write it up. So for example, First Day in the Lakes District is posted under August 6, even though I wrote it yesterday. Years later, I’ll be able to reconstruct the chronology of what happens. If this gets too out of hand, I’ll make a page with recently added posts so you don’t have to scroll all the way through looking for changes.

    As an update on what is happening right now, it was a very pleasant warm day, so warm that it made me drowsy. And I have two pieces of very good news. The first is that Felipe told me he would be happy to have me stay past the duration of the exchange. This is good because like it, here so staying a little longer is always good. It also means that he is happy with the work I am doing. Learning to program can be frustrating, since you don’t always have much to show for all the effort you put in to learning how to do something. The second piece of good news is that Tom Witten, the Chicago contact for the exchange, told me I will be reimbursed for whatever mode of transportation I decide to take back to States. This means I can take the bus back! Imagine ~$500 of free bus travel through South and Central America. My loans will be do about 3 months after my job ends, so I have about that much time to laze around and enjoy my youth. If you have any friends who live down here or tips about what to do south of the border, let me know about them so I can start planning them in. Wagons North!

Update: I finished writing a long entry about a Wedding Party I went to about two weeks ago.