The life of an undergraduate begins with one crisis and ends with another. The first is precipitated by the question, “What do I do in college?”, and the second by the question, “What do I do after college?”
Choosing Physics
The first question is typically answered by Indian students in the final year of school. No situation could be less favourable to making a wise choice. The pressure of impending board examinations is overwhelming, students are herded onto well-trodden paths, little informed advice is available, and there are few opportunities to meet peers who’ve made choices differently.
At Ashoka, on the other hand, students are not expected to have made a decision on their major at the time of joining. They are free of the pressure of the final year of school, sample a range of disciplines through the foundation and gateway courses, meet peers from a wide variety of backgrounds, and get to talk to informed faculty on what it means to choose a certain subject as a major. We have every expectation, therefore, that those who choose to major in physics at Ashoka will find it well-suited to their inclinations and abilities.
Doing Physics
Doing physics is not easy. Even experts will agree that it is an extraordinarily challenging discipline. The reason for this is that it requires one to constantly bring together two ways of thinking – the intuitive and the formal – that are often at odds with each other.
Our intuitions about the world evolved in the circumstances peculiar to life on earth and so are severely limited. What
appears obvious to us may be correct within the domain of our perceptions, but can be completely wrong outside it. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is the world of the very small. It is impossible for us to imagine that an object can move without having a well-defined path – but we find that that is in fact true for objects like electrons! Physics tries to overcome these limitations by using observations and intuitions to construct mathematical models, exploring their ramifications, and comparing them with phenomena. These models in turn inform our intuitions. The constant interplay between intuition- driven thinking and model-based thinking has proved to be extremely powerful – it is this that a student of physics is expected to master.
A student majoring in physics must be trained in the mathematical description of the world that is called theoretical physics, in the refined observation that is called experimental physics, and in computational techniques that are used in all areas of physics. The sequence of physics courses at Ashoka is designed to do this. It begins with two second-semester gateway courses – Mathematical and Computational Toolkit and An Introduction to Physics Through Experiments – designed to introduce the discipline. (These courses will, we hope, also prove useful to those who, after doing them, decide to major in a discipline other than physics.) In the third and fourth semesters we have all the courses that form part of a standard physics undergraduate curriculum. In the fifth and sixth semesters there are electives. And in the sixth semester we have a course that brings together all the physics learnt thus far.
Moving On
In the final year of an undergraduate programme a student faces the second crisis: “What do I do after college?” Most of those who major in physics do not end up becoming scientists. Yet most good physics programmes in India are designed for professional physicists. Of course this serves a purpose, for it is essential that an undergraduate major have a solid core, and that those who intend to pursue the discipline be given the opportunity to study it deeply. But it is equally important to give those who want to move into allied areas the opportunity to use their foundation in physics to explore these areas effectively. The elective courses offered in the physics programmes in the fifth and sixth semester offer both possibilities.
On the whole the physics programme at Ashoka is designed to allow a wise choice of major, a solid core, and the chance to explore possibilities within and outside the domain of physics.
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