I have come to tell you stories or, rather, a story about the telling of stories, and what it has taught me about you, and about myself, and about teaching. I want to talk about some of the ways the world has changed, and the lesson of these changing times.
But first, let me explain. My colleagues and I share the view that much of the learning of physics takes place between the time you leave our slick, highly polished, transparently clear lectures, and the time you finally mud-wrestle the unexpectedly difficult (and confusing) weekly problem set into submission. I believe this is a different pedagogical model from universities in many other countries, and it sends you into the world with a deeper understanding of physics than, for example, many of your European peers.
Now, I can only write so many problems in which "a particle of mass M moving with initial velocity v0 in a viscous medium with drag coefficient g" does something of educational value before dying of boredom.
This, of course, brings us to the legend of Urk..n's Deli and Hardware Emporium. Urk..n's Hardware is a real place, run by a proprietress known locally for her democratic, unbiased obnoxiousness.
She is distrustful of graduate students. She is rude to assistant professors. She is generally unpleasant to the retired relatives of former assistant professors. And, with a certain amount of exaggeration, her store provided the setting for many Physics 225/326 word problems.
Thanks to the vagaries of food chemistry, the Emporium's unsuccessful attempts at combining pineapple chunks with lime Jell-o provided a more entertaining way to craft viscosity problems. Further, Urk..n's allowed you to learn physics in an interdisciplinary context:
Most useful of all to Physics 225 was the versatile bratwurst, a fine product of the award-winning UIUC Meat Sciences department. Improperly cooked brats can explode, rocketing off the Deli's grill at relativistic speeds. Strings of brats can be manufactured to contain precisely synchronized clocks.
And, when necessary, they can be used by Urk..n's to bomb the competition.
I realize that it was alarming, at first, to be taking physics from a crack pot, but you were good sports about it, and it added a certain amount of levity to the first tough physics course in your curriculum.
Some of the problems were recycled from courses I'd taught previously. Here's an example:
The Coneheads were characters from "Saturday Night Live" featured in a movie a few years ago. Aliens from the planet Remulak, they gave fried eggs to Trick-or-Treater's and drank beer by the 6-pack, all six cans opened simultaneously. They described themselves as "party animals" and I always thought they were hysterically funny.
I wrote a Lorentz-contraction problem in which a fleet of Conehead spaceships flew through an interstellar Vodka cloud. You had this problem, as homework, I think, but I used it the first time in a different course, Physics 210, around 1990.
After this extended red herring, I have arrived at the point of my story.
None of the Physics 210 students laughed. Now, that's not a big deal, only some of my jokes are funny. What I realized was that my students had never heard of the Coneheads: they had been on "Saturday Night Live" when I was a graduate student (when my students had been preschoolers), and the movie was still a few years off.
This took me completely by surprise. I suppose it should have been pretty obvious that this would happen, but I'd always felt that I was just an older version of them with a sort of smooth, continuous (differentiable, normalizable, whatever) thread connecting my world and their world. The fact that our experiences were so disjoint, due to the differences in our ages, came as a shock. Further, they (and you, I think) naturally tend to view the faculty as members of a different subspecies, grouped together with parents and other "adults."
Consider how you look from my perspective, when you've made it through the first two semesters of intro physics and first arrive in my classroom.
Many (I think most) of you arrive with career goals that are much like mine and my colleagues: you hope to end up doing research and/or teaching, perhaps at a college or university, perhaps in industry. (I realize that your plans may change as you come to a better understanding of your interests and strengths.)
You are concerned with the difficulty of the subject matter, and worry that you don't have the intellectual skills necessary to stay with the subject. During my course you're trying to get a sense of whether or not you can "cut it." The material is tough-- this is the first time you're required to use calculus (multi-variable calculus!!) as an everyday tool. You don't yet have enough experience to realize that it's OK for the material to be difficult-- it doesn't mean that you don't belong, rather that we have a lot to teach you, and you need to be challenged. (I remember how alarming this was for me as a college student.)
This process of measuring yourself against the material, rather than competing with each other, makes it natural for you to work cooperatively together. I think many of you have formed bonds of friendship through this which will last your entire lives. You'll collaborate professionally, go backpacking together after conferences, and watch each other's children grow. This has certainly been my experience, and it gives me a great deal of pleasure to see you setting out this way.
Newly arrived in Physics 225, you were at the earliest stage in your academic lives where (it's clear to me), you could be identified as potential colleagues, as fellow physicists. Very junior, yes. Inexperienced. But there are so many things about what you are doing now that are like the things that I've done, that it's always felt to me that the majors are fledgling physicists, and part of an "us" rather than a "them."
And so I was surprised to be reminded by my Physics 210 students that we had rather different backgrounds.
That "Coneheads" experience was eight years ago, and now I'm about the same age as many of your parents. I still feel the same way; if anything, getting to know you through Physics 225 and 326 has reinforced and clarified this for me.
This brings with it obligations (mostly pleasurable) that my faculty colleagues and I wouldn't have in a different field, where most students were passing through on their way to other pursuits. You need to have a chance to see what it's like to end up doing physics for a living. This isn't something we can teach in a class; rather, we need to let you see what it's like for us, how we live, and how we balance our work and family responsibilities. We talk about our own experiences, our children, our research, subjects that excite us, our hobbies. We help you find lab jobs. You see us with our families at end-of-semester barbecues. (The brats don't really explode.)
So- part of what we do is to help you enter into our professional world, at least to browse, to see if it feels like a suitable place to spend much of your adult life.
I have more to say about the differences between the world of my college years and the world of yours, and about the changes that have taken place since I was a child.
My daughter, Cordelia, is in the third grade.
When I was in the third grade, a naval blockade of Cuba, meant to keep Soviet ICBM's out of the western hemisphere, nearly led to a nuclear war.
Repressive, murderous governments ruled Spain, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia... (The list is very long.)
Bombers flew "racetrack patterns" in international airspace twenty-four hours a day, ready to drop nuclear weapons on large cities.
Protestant-Catholic hostility in Northern Ireland, as well as Arab-Israeli confrontations in the Middle East continued.
U.S. military involvement in Vietnam had already begun.
When I was in high school, there were tens of thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at cities in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Nelson Mandella was in prison.
In all ways, the Vietnam war had become a nightmare.
Tensions in the Middle East flared into a short, bloody war. Another war, a few years later, nearly went nuclear. Apparently, many of the Israeli warheads were targeted at sites in the Soviet Union.
Bloodshed in Northern Ireland continued.
An "overly democratic" government in Czechoslovakia was crushed by a Soviet invasion.
The world was terribly dangerous, and full of bloody Gordian knots without solution.
The changes since then have been astonishing. And, remarkably, Alexander's sword has proved to be concerted action by groups of citizens who demand that their governments respect their rights as human beings, and follow rational policies. Twenty-five years ago I didn't think this could happen.
Promising discussions between Catholic and Protestant factions in Northern Ireland, and the British government, seem likely to end bloodshed there.
Israeli and Palestinian diplomats are making (bumpy but significant) progress towards peace in the Middle East. When I was in college, any sort of negotiations had seemed impossible.
In a peaceful transition, the racist government in South Africa has been replaced by a representative democracy.
Pressure from domestic protests ended United States involvement in the Vietnam war two years earlier than would have otherwise been the case.
There are no Soviet/Russian nuclear warheads aimed at the United States.
There are democratically elected governments in Spain, and in most Eastern European countries. The Soviet Union is gone.
Some of these changes have proved to be a mixed blessing: sadly, the collapse of repressive governments has unmasked the terrible ethnic hostilities that plague parts of Europe.
The world that Cordelia is growing into, and the world of the first part of your adult lives, is complicated, messy, unfinished, and still full of injustice. But many problems that (I thought) would never be solved have disappeared.
The lesson to be learned, I think, is this: all things can be made to change for the better; nothing is impossible. Be fair, speak out against unacceptable conduct, be honest, try to understand other people, listen well. It seems that this is what unties (not cleaves) a Gordian knot. It really works, and it changes the world.
Actually, you know all this. I've found the students I've taught to be wholly admirable, sensible folks. Your parents have raised you well, and you know how to judge right from wrong, even in complicated situations. Just listen to your inner voice and trust your instincts.
When my daughter was a baby, Melanie, Cordelia, and I lived in a small town in the rolling hills of the Delaware River valley. The town was surrounded by fields and forests, there were streams, a lake. Early in the morning, I'd zip Cordelia into a bunting, and we'd go for a stroll before I drove to the University. The sky was brilliant blue, the morning air carried a crisp, fresh scent, and the canopy of trees was full of birdsong. I was always struck, every morning we did this, with a sense of the infinite potential, the unlimited possibilities, brought by the new day, by the new morning.
So, on behalf of my colleagues, I congratulate you, and welcome you to the boundless, glorious morning of your adult lives. Thank you for asking me to speak today; it means a great deal to me.
