In the Dark

A couple of articles appeared recently that I encourage people to read who are studying physics, or interested in studying physics.

The first article by Carl Wieman is from Physics Today and is entitled How to become a successful physicist. It is aimed at graduate students, though most of what it says is relevant to those at an earlier stage of their studies. Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning:

The primary characteristic of a successful physicist is being a good problem solver.

The article goes on to say some very interesting and instructive things, and is well worth reading in its entirety. There are one or two things that I don’t agree with though. One is the statement that…

…textbook problems provide all the information needed and have a single well-defined path to a solution.

That’s true of many problems at an elementary level, but problems at undergraduate or graduate level often have more than one way of finding the solution. That’s certainly true of many that I set as assignments. Indeed, sometimes the students come up with better ways of approaching them than I did! The important difference between textbook and research problems is that you know the textbook problems have a solution. Research is scarier because you don’t know at the outset that an answer can be found!

The second article, by Ethan Siegel, is called The secret to becoming an excellent physicist. Here is a quote from that, revealing the “secret”:

It’s simplicity itself: you become good at physics by solving physics problems. That’s it: that’s the secret. If you want to become competent at physics, you will solve physics problems in the area you wish to learn.

I hope you get the message. It’s not about rote-learning facts and formulae. The brain is much more than a memory device. It’s all about problem-solving. The ability to do that effectively can only be learned through practice.

I’m currently teaching two modules on Mathematical Physics and I devote most of the time in lectures for both of them to doing worked examples rather than proving theorems or presenting facts, theorems, derivations, formulae, etc to learn. I spend quite a lot of time in lectures giving students things to work out, which makes classes more interactive, but students also have tutorials built around problem-solving tasks to complement this.

If you’re interested you can see my post on How to Solve Physics Problems; there is also a video version here.

I’d add one piece of advice. If you really want to develop as a physicist, don’t just solve a lot of easy problems; challenge yourself by tackling difficult ones too. Don’t be afraid to get “stuck” or make a mistake, as those are both necessary parts of the learning process. Above all, develop the confidence in your ability to take on a problem and back yourself to solve it and don’t be deterred if the answer doesn’t come quickly!

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This entry was posted on October 22, 2022 at 11:41 am and is filed under Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags Carl Wieman, Ethan Siegel, Physics, problem solving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.