"We’re trying to build intuition into our students."
Dennis Krause was a graduate student at Purdue University when his roommate called him to his laboratory.
"He’d built an atomic force microscope," Krause recalls. "When he saw his first atom, he called me down to take a look. It was gold, I believe, but just seeing an individual atom was what was exciting. Atomic theory was no longer a concept to me, but tangible reality. I’d seen it with my own eyes. Such moments change the way one thinks about the universe."
The professor and chair of the Wabash physics department wants that sort of epiphany for his students, and he and his colleagues in the physics department are reshaping the curriculum to get it.
It begins in the lab.
"Anyone who has done a physics lab knows how greatly the real world differs from theory," Krause says. "Reality’s a little more complicated, and you really don’t appreciate physics until you’ve done the experiment."
But Krause says that under the College’s old physics curriculum, you could major in physics with only three semesters of labs.
"Three semesters don’t give students a feel for what’s current in physics or prepare them very well for the future," Krause says. "In the new facility in Goodrich, we’re getting research-grade equipment into students’ hands, and they’ll be doing cutting edge experiments."
With professors John Caraher and Jim Brown doing single photon interferometry with students in Goodrich, those experiments have begun.
"We’re demonstrating quantum phenomena," Krause says. "These aren’t classical or historical experiments, but cutting-edge stuff."
Caraher, an atomic physicist, is also planning trapped-atom experiments—cooling and trapping of single atoms that will give students unusual undergraduate hands-on experience.
Brown, an experimental nuclear physicist, took a student with him this summer to work at the cyclotron at Michigan State.
The theoretical physicist of the group, Krause is working closely with his colleagues and listening to students in re-shaping courses to "give the students a coherent vision of physics" and provide an earlier introduction to hands-on, experimental physics.
And in the new Physics 113 course, Krause threw out the instruction book.
"We needed to get the students away from lab manuals—give them limited instruction and let them figure out the procedures themselves," Krause says.
"We’ve already taught them how to use the equipment, and they know enough to be able to figure this out. They can learn much more from their mistakes than they will from following a lab manual.
"We’re trying to build intuition into our students," Krause explains.
In the same freshman course, students learn how to write up a scientific paper using LaTex software that’s the standard in grad school and research institutions.
Driving this curriculum re-shaping is what Krause calls "a coherent vision amongst all of us in the department that the students can see even if they’re taking different courses.
"We’re envisioning a liberal arts physics major who understands the basic ideas of physics, has hands-on working knowledge of the experimental, sees his courses as interconnected, the way a professional physicist sees them—like a very complicated novel where everything comes together at the end. He knows how all this fits with other disciplines, and he can write well, speak well, present his ideas clearly and effectively. That’s our goal, and we’re finding the way to make that a reality."
Krause also believes the physics department can contribute more to the overall Wabash curriculum.
"Physics has all these links to the liberal arts—the operation of the universe, the nature of reality, space and time, all these fundamental issues," he says, noting that the department’s astronomy course is hugely popular with students.
"But it fills up so fast that, in the past, mostly seniors took it," Krause says. "So this year, I reserved five or six slots in the course for freshmen. How are we going to get conversations about physics going between students on campus if our most popular course is taken only by seniors who graduate that semester?"
Krause has numerous ideas for freshman tutorials, including a course he taught at Williams College called "Confronting the Mysterious" which studied ways to apply science to topics such as psychic phenomena, UFOs, and other pseudo-science.
But for the time being, Krause and his colleagues are focusing on the department’s majors, minors, and new curriculum.
"We’ve got a lot of work to do, but we want to grow," Krause says. "That’s one purpose of this new curriculum, new facilities, and conversations with admissions director Steve Klein about how we recruit new physics students.
"We’ll get the program in place, get the word out, and show them this is not the Wabash physics department of the past, but of the future."