Physics knowledge:
Comparisons of
U.S. and Chinese
freshmen college students
L Bao et al., Science,
323: 586–587 (2009).
Students interested in nanotechnology have often asked me for advice on what to study. I plan to write a series of posts about this, but there’s one basic piece of advice that will serve not only for nanotechnology, but for almost any area of physical science and technology: Study math and physics, then study more, and start as early as you can. They are fundamental to understanding almost everything else.
Judging by a recent article in Science, if you are as student in the US and not in college yet, it might be a good idea discount the math and physics curriculum of your school and learn these subjects some other way — that is, if you want to keep up with world standards.
From the Science article:
…Chinese schools adhere to a national standard within all courses. In physics, for example, every student goes through the same physics courses, which start in grade 8 and continue every semester through grade 12, providing 5 years of continuous training on introductory physics topics. The courses are algebra-based with emphasis on development of conceptual understanding and skills needed to solve problems.
Meanwhile,
K–12 physics education in the United States is more varied. Although students study physics-related topics within other general science courses, only one of three high school students enrolls in a two-semester physics course.
The graphs above show the result. The levels of knowledge among college freshmen in the two countries don’t merely differ, they scarcely overlap. The authors note that random guessing would on average earn a score of 6.
Update comment: Understanding advanced nanotechnology requires an understanding of the physics of molecular motion, and that starts with mechanics. Without this (and more), it’s impossible to read Nanosystems with much comprehension.
Beyond its effect on students, the scarcity of basic scientific education in the US has degraded the quality of the most basic sort of public understanding. Ignorance favored the spread of crazy distortions of ideas from Engines of Creation (1986), and has inhibited the spread of more accurate perceptions based on work from Nanosystems (1992) forward. In the US (and the UK, which has similar educational deficiencies), the popularity of crazy distortions set the stage for an ugly backlash that peaked about 10 years ago, with chilling effects that linger today. In visits to countries with a more science-intensive general education — India, China, Brazil, Singapore, Korea — I’ve encountered very little of this.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Argh, we can’t even do graphs right. Those should be bar charts, not curves.
The scientific backlash may have peaked around 1998, but I’d say the political backlash got a lot worse in 2001. Ralph Merkle was still getting papers published in mainstream nanotech journals in the second half of the 90′s.
2001 was when Bill Joy published “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us” in Wired, just after the NNI was funded. Suddenly, everyone receiving nanotech funding found it necessary to say that molecular manufacturing was impossible.
And Bill Joy’s assertion – that one laboratory “oops” could destroy the world – wasn’t a distortion of your technical ideas, but an amplification of a hypothetical usage scenario which you’d spent about three paragraphs on in 1986 and then made thoroughly obsolete in 1992.
Even if the technical distortions hadn’t happened, I’m not sure the political problems in the early 2000′s would have been alleviated much. Money talks.
Chris