Einstein on the Sidewalk

I was reading through an old journal of mine from the nineties, where I put non-research related thoughts, and came across an essay I had intended to work on and submit to Physics Today. It was called “Einstein on the Sidewalk,” playing a bit on the opera “Einstein on the Beach” by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. Post-tenure, which I received in 1990, I had time to consider the relevance of physics to the rest of the world, and this essay reflects that. I had a difficult time figuring out how to close the essay, and I will drop the closing paragraph, augmenting with some thoughts from today. Otherwise, I will leave it mostly as I wrote it in 1996, when I was visiting the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, for a workshop on Non-Fermi Liquid Metals.

The theme of the essay is how to take physics outdoors, something very much on my mind as I ran through the hills and beaches around Santa Barbara, and rode my bike up and down a mountain between my guest apartment and the UCSB campus. Some of the issues raised are still very much alive in the academic physics community, heightened by the external attacks on the university from the Trump administration and by the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

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March, 1996

Curriculum reform is a hot issue in physics circles these days. As jobs dry up, major pools shrink, and massive projects die, all of us feel a general sense of uneasiness about the future of our field.

Nobel laureates say “it ain’t broke, make it work better!” Many physicists, old and young alike, bow at the altar of the economy (note from today: in the 90s, many physicists, unable to land academic positions, turned en masse to financial modelling jobs on Wall Street, in Hedge Funds, and in big banks). In a recent American Physical Society Newsletter a young physicist, Francis Slakey, encouraged professors to attend community development meetings with their students.

I would like to share a different story that points to something I feel is missing from the physics curriculum and the ongoing dialogues: one of the best pedagogical moves I ever made came one day when I listened to my students and followed their suggestion to take our class outdoors.

This was on a glorious spring day in Ohio when blooming bushes, buzzing bees, and melodious cardinals were enchanting the campus at The Ohio State University and enticing the senses, inviting blissful reverie at the nearest grassy site. I had partaken in such spring rituals myself as an undergraduate at the University of Washington 20 years before. This was the setting outside as I prepared to enter my windowless classroom and work with my first year Honors Physics Class on solving problems from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

Physicists who teach it know that Relativity is a mind bending, awe-inspiring grabber of a topic. It was Relativity, in all its strange beauty, that attracted me to physics as a high school junior. But on this day, even the allure of Einstein was not enough to quiet my restless students.

As I walked in the door, before the bell rang, someone immediately suggested “Why don’t we work outside?” For a brief moment, my Joe Friday Physics Cop almost opened his mouth to say, “Sorry, but this serious work must be done in this dreary room.” Then a more original, spontaneous identity within recognized the brilliance of the suggestion, stating “Great Idea! We can grab some chalk and solve these problems on the sidewalk!”

And so we stepped outside, split into groups, and wrote equations on the sidewalks. Each group took turns explaining the significance of their pavement scriptures to the others. Twice more during the spring quarter we repeated this outdoor activity.

Now I fast forward to the end of the term. Student evaluations contained the usual blend of praise and complaint (more of the former for me, fortunately), but the most remembered events of the quarter, hands down, were the sidewalk days.

This is purely anecdotal, non-statistical, and I will claim no evidence based conclusions in what follows. I have no proof that the students learned Relativity more deeply or will take Lorentz transformations to their graves because of this sunny day in Ohio. What they may well remember, long past their college days, is that they enjoyed studying physics in the glory of springtime.

The real lesson I got from this class is about what is often missing from the curriculum: a sense of meaningful contact with the natural world. In our drive towards abstraction and romance with the new means of looking at the world with technology, physics has, in the mainstream at least, lost sight of the world my students longed for that gorgeous day.

We say we study nature, but consider this: apart from a smattering of astrophysicists, geophysicists, atmospheric physicists, biophysicists, and lovers of complex systems, the closest we get to scrutinizing the world outside our air conditioned labs or humming workstations is when we notice a bird singing or a flower blooming on the way to work. Physics has gone indoors, relying on sophisticated equipment to create and study phenomena that exist nowhere else in the universe but our laboratories or supercomputers. Our textbooks are littered with abstract puzzles to solve that have only the tiniest thread of connection to the outside of the physics building. “Four charges are assembled in a square…”. What are these charges? How did they get there?

Trained in this world, many of us lead dual lives: one colleague is an avid birder, many run marathons perhaps for the many miles spent training in nature, many are hikers or rock climbers. Successful theorists lead the sweetest duality, dazzled by the natural beauty in trips to Aspen, Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, Seattle, Erice, Trieste, Cargese, Banff. 

From my own perspective, this disconnection from nature is all the more problematic in view of the increasing degradation of the environment. Bright young hearts and minds, properly inspired, can go on to work on global warming, improving renewable energy sources, and taking physics ideas to other areas like biodiversity studies where there may be value added from the quantitative physics approach to science.

Don’t get me wrong: anything done to pull physics out of the isolationist, business as usual, ever lengthening PhD time stupor it finds itself in is to be welcomed. Thus I applaud vigorously the critical and brilliant self-examination in the recent Physics Today article by Gruner et al. which exhorted us to redefine ourselves in terms of Physics as an approach to science, and to look for interesting science problems we can help solve wherever they may be. Thus I cheer the recent call by Frances Slakey for professors and students to attend community development meetings. Thus I am thrilled by the desire of many department chairs to form better liaisons with Industry.

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Much has changed in Physics in the last several decades. Physics Education Research has established rigorous approaches to improve our pedagogy through evidence based studies, especially leading to more inquiry based approaches pioneered by the late Lilian McDermott. Lecture halls have been enlivened with the kinds of useful PEER questions Eric Mazur developed to pair with clicker technology. Flipped classrooms have become widely used as the “banking model” of education has been devalued relative to active learning.

Physics itself has gone wildly more interdisciplinary. Leaders like Brad Marston have shown how meaningful contributions to environmental problems, including climate change, can be made. Biological physics has grown dramatically as a field in the last thirty years, and physicists have worked in significant ways on problems in protein folding, protein aggregation, systems biology, and both experimental and computational neuroscience. Far more instruments have become available for studying the cosmos, including the LIGO Gravitational observatory, the Vera Rubin Observatory, and the James Webb Space telescope.

I myself moved from Ohio State to University of California, Davis the year after I wrote the essay, and shifted from rather esoteric quantum impurity problems in solid state physics to, first, efforts to work on the environment and, second, a long period of exploration of problems in biological physics (including electronic properties of DNA, protein aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases and biomaterials, plant cell division, computational neuroscience, and binding of SARS-COV2 virions to antibodies and receptor proteins). I have seen physics departments grow more diverse topically and in their staff and students, particularly in terms of gender, and for the student body also in terms of age demographics. Some of the very best PhD students at Davis were non-traditional in their route to study, having had a career before returning to the laboratories.

There are still concerns: the specter of the right wing control of universities being pushed by the Trump administration paired with the rise of Artificial Intelligence may pose existential threats to academic physics. In particular, the size of current physics faculties is dependent upon the teaching of service courses to engineering, biology, and premed majors. If AI can offer less expensive and credible alternatives, the rationale for current faculty full time equivalent numbers may evaporate. Curricula are still stubbornly immutable at most institutions, threatening physics with the “Latin of the Sciences” label. This means that physics in some ways under-girds other sciences as Latin is foundational to many European based modern languages, but like Latin, the actual science of physics could become irrelevant in daily research for many. Additionally, the growth in startup costs for experimental physics looks potentially unsustainable.

I retired from this beautifully messy world of academic physics three years ago, just as the public version of Chat GPT burst forth and the possibility of a second Trump administration looked distant. I have no regrets about the rewards of my career in research and teaching. It has been a privilege. I hope that this essay, which spans nearly thirty years of my life, can inform thinking about how academic physics can survive and remain relevant going forward.

And I still look back with a big smile at Lorentz transformations written on sidewalk squares between the Physics and Chemistry buildings at Ohio State.

Note: the image at the top was found on Reddit. The London based artist is shown, but her name is unknown.