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Anybody can do physics!

By Kevin Pitts
June 20, 2012

 

Carl Weiman won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for producing something called a Bose-Einstein condensate. After his Nobel Prize, he got seriously interested in “physics education research” which is the study of how students learn physics and an ongoing effort to determine the best ways to help them learn physics. (Hint: physics education research has taught us that lecturing to students by writing a bunch of equations on a chalkboard is one of the worst ways to teach physics!)   Most recently, Weiman has been the Associate Director of Science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy. (President Obama has two Nobel Prize winning physicists in his administration, pretty amazing.)
 
He addressed the conference I was at last week. His talk covered much of the latest research on how students learn and who is capable of learning.
 
It was really interesting. One of my favorite quotes of the evening was:   “Everybody that went to school is an expert on education, and this thinking pervades government.”    In other words, since everybody went to school, they think they are an expert on education, and therefore think they know best how to improve our educational system. Although elected officials may mean well, some of their policies are not helpful.
 
One of the most striking things he described has to do with who is capable of learning and doing physics. Studies have shown that it takes someone about 10,000 hours of practice (about 5 years) to become expert at something. What’s interesting is that with that much practice, you can become expert at just about anything, such as chess, a musical instrument or physics. In other words, Carl said, we say that physics is hard, but it isn’t any harder than anything else. Anybody can become an expert in physics if they put in the effort. 
 
Of course, a person must be motivated to put in that effort and, very importantly, the effort has to be well focused.   I can “practice” the piano by randomly slamming the piano keys for 10,000 hours and that won’t make me a piano expert.  
 
So as educators, we need to help students understand the relevance of science to help motivate them to make the effort. This is consistent with the PCAST report that I blogged about recently.   We also need to make sure that the time they put in is focused and effective.   If we can do those two things, then anybody can learn physics and do great things.

 

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