Dear Mr. President,
Do you know much about physics?
I mean, you're the President of the United States: a country with five thousand nuclear
weapons, birthplace of the world's computing and telecommunications industry, home of the
first atomic clock and creator of the global positioning system.
But chances are, if you just took regular American high school physics, you don't know
one iota about the science behind these things (No offense).
That's because high school physics students across most of America are not required to
learn about pretty much any physical phenomena discovered or explained more recently than
1865.
Yes, 1865.
That's the year the civil war ended and well over a decade before Albert Einstein was even
born!
You know what can happen in 150 years, Mr. President?
A lot.
Velcro, for one.
But let me list some useful and important ideas of the last 150 years of physics that
aren't a required part of most standard US high school physics courses:
Photons.
The structure of atoms.
The existence of Antimatter.
GPS.
Lasers.
Transistors.
Diodes and LEDs.
Quarks.
Chaos Theory.
Electron Microscopy.
MRI scanning.
The Big Bang.
Black Holes.
Star formation.
The fact that gravity bends light.
The fact that the universe is expanding.
The Higgs Boson and the weak and strong nuclear forces and all the rest of quantum mechanics
and relativity and the topic of every single Nobel Prize in Physics since…
always.
Basically, most of the important stuff.
I mean, Mr. President, imagine if history classes didn't talk about the abolition of
slavery, world wars I or II, the great depression, the rise of the US as a global superpower,
the cold war or the civil rights movement or heaven forbid the first African American
President.
Or imagine if biology classes didn't talk about DNA, or hormones, or cell reproduction
or the modern germ theory of disease or ecology.
Or if geologists didn't talk about plate tectonics.
And computer scientists…
well… in 1865 a computer was a person who computed your taxes.
Now, if you were lucky enough to have an ambitious teacher or take Advanced Placement Physics,
then you might have learned about some of Einstein's discoveries of 1905!
Yes!
Current events!
But learning about how Einstein's work helped set the stage for a century of amazing developments
in our understanding of the universe is not a part of the standard curriculum.
So why, Mr. President, am I addressing this letter to you?
Well, you appoint the Secretary of Education, for one - and I do believe that high school
physics is somewhat related to education.
Now, maybe your education secretary says, "ancient physics is already hard to teach
to high schoolers.
And you want us to teach them modern physics which is even harder?!
Students can't really appreciate the beauty of modern physics without fancy college level
mathematics."
RUBBISH.
Ever heard of Carl Sagan?
Richard Feynman?
Or Neil deGrasse Tyson?
These great men have been 100% committed to the appreciation and dissemination of the
awesomeness of the universe.
And we should be too.
How else are we supposed to foster and find our future brilliant innovators, inventors,
and explorers?
How can we expect to educate our citizens for the next century if we don't teach about
the last?
And that's not to say that we should ignore math, either - on the contrary, math is one
of the most beautiful and awesome things in the universe, especially because it allows
us to understand the universe.
In particular, the last 150 years have borne fruit to perhaps the most drastic changes
in our understanding of the universe, ever, and these new ways of thinking and solving
problems should be the centerpiece of an education in physics.
Between you and me, Mr. President, I think we'd better start making physics education
more awesome here in the US, otherwise the next Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman will come
from somewhere with more educational foresight - maybe even, the Internet.
Sincerely,
A collection of atoms known as Henry
ps you're probably super busy, but if you'd like to hear about physics education across
the Atlantic, I highly recommend heading over to Brady's channel, Sixty Symbols, for a perspective
from the UK.
I bet you'll enjoy it.