Peter Woit on Teaching Strings to Undergraduates

Peter Woit has posted on teaching strings to undergrads. Apparently a number of top schools have started offering the course. MIT was first, and Barton Zweibach's textbook was the result of that course.

Maybe now that there’s a textbook, that is what has caused other institutions to follow suit. Caltech has Physics 134, String Theory, and Carnegie-Mellon has Physics 33-652, An Introduction to String Theory. Stanford goes its competitors one better by having two undergraduate courses in string theory: Physics 153A, Introduction to String Theory I, and Physics 153B, Introduction to String Theory II. This last course even promises to explain to students how string theory is connected to particle physics.

Peter doesn't say in his post how he feels about this, but the post attracted a flurry of comments from anti-stringers, some alleged stringers who dissed Peter in semiLubosian fashion, and more measured critiques (of Peter) from (string theorists) Clifford Johnson and Aaron Bergmann - minus much in the way of specifics.

It also had one great comment from a non-string theorist who took Zwiebach's original course:
I took the class myself a couple years ago back when we were still given the typed manuscript for free (there now I’ve definitely given away my identity for a couple readers of the weblog for sure) and even though obviously I chose a different branch of physics for my graduate work I have to say that the course was simply outstanding and Barton Zwiebach is one of the finest teachers I’ve ever had. Yeah string theory as science has definitely seen better days, but the class itself is a great way to learn a lot of the tools used in modern physics. The way Barton teaches it also makes it a neat way to see how different theoretical underpinnings can come together - the calculation of the Beckenstein-Hawking entropy result for example played a big role in my personal decision to pursue statistical mechanics as a graduate student (now of course, as a statistical mechanician, I can laugh at all you particle guys whose work is simply an input into our theories ).

Also I’d like to point out that while the class started with probably 60 people (including 30 or so undergrads) the year I took it, we only ended with 6 undergrads by the end I think and about 20 graduate students. So before anyone gets too worried about Barton’s corruption of us youth I think it’s worth thinking about the positive aspects of the class - I of course cannot speak to the other institutions’ courses, but I learned a lot of useful tricks in 8.251 that I use to this day.

I think this is right on. I love Zwiebach's textbook. It is a true pedagogical masterpiece. I don't doubt that there other physics subjects upon which undergrads can equally (or more) usefully practice their quantization skills, but learning to quantize a relativistic string in n-dimensions is a lot of fun.

Of course it's quite possible that strings don't exist, or that they do, but won't show up experimentally anytime soon. I talked my son into taking one of those courses even though he had no interest in being a string theorist. Maybe I should ask him what he thought of it. Any comment, #2 son?

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