7/27/2019 Open Letter to Next Generation

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7/27/2019 Open Letter to Next Generation

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connected easily with experiment. Ihad no answer. I did not get the job.Incidentally, for a role model in theopposite direction, I recommend Mar-vin L. Cohen and his calculations; hehas used pseudopotential and othertechniques on real materials withstrong connections to experiment.

When we begin learning aboutsomething, it is comforting to be ableto surround itto achieve a con-crete understanding of what we aredealing with and thereby have a pre-cise understanding of what we need toknow. Mathematical problems thatare easy to surround are said to bewell posed, but just because they arewell defined does not mean they relateto reality. An intuitive feel for realityis necessary for doing physics. Math-ematics is essential, but so are themeasurements and their meaning.

Having unrealistic goalsEarly on, I somehow got the idea that

being a theorist was the only trulyprestigious objective in physics. Inmy heart, I felt that nuclear or high-energy physics was the most noble.Despite my eventually settling onsolid-state, I thought for a long timethat the subject was not importantenough. Maybe I bought into someprecursor of the idea, often attributedto Murray Gell-Mann, that solid-state physics was really squalid-statephysics. I finally came to see thatevery physics subfield has many fas-cinating, rewarding, and useful prob-lems. The trick is to find an area youcan handle. And today, even though Ihave written a text on solid-statephysics, I would not say I have mas-tered the topic to the extent that itdeserves.

In my early teaching, I often triedto do too much, either to learn some-thing new or to impress the students.It wasnt until I figured out thatmy job was to teach the students inmy class, rather than to make asplash, that I began to succeed as aninstructor.

Our goals should fit our interests

and aptitude. It is all very well to at-tempt solving the most fundamentalproblems, but not all of us can makeheadway on them. Sometimes otherproblems, perhaps less fundamental,offer us rich opportunities for makingcontributions. We need to think care-fully before doing our work. Of course,if we are excited and interested in it,we will have fun. Otherwise, workmay seem like total drudgery.

Not referring to original literatureScientific papers are almost alwaysmore complete and understandable

than their digested versions in books.A recent example for me involved thehalf-integer quantum Hall effect. Inever seemed to get the point of itfrom texts. Then I ran into HorstStormers Nobel Prize address.1

Somehow that paper, involving boththeoretical ideas and experiment,clicked with me. After digesting it, Iwas able to read the original papers.

When we want to know something,there is a tendency to seek a quick an-swer in a textbook. This often works,but we need to get in the habit of look-ing at original papers. Textbooks areoften abbreviated second- or third-hand distortions of the facts, and theyusually do not convey the flavor of sci-entific research.

Never memorizing basic factsGraduate students at Kansas neededto take some courses outside theirmajor. I chose to take a couple ofcourses involving group theory withWilliam R. Scott. I could not followhim, even though he was a renownedexpert in the field. He expected thatafter he defined something, we wouldremember the definition and he couldthen use the term without elabora-tion. I was lost because of my faultymemory. I had a similar problemwhile attending American PhysicalSociety meetings.

Although memorization is not thegoal of physics, when we listen to pre-sentations, we need to know what thespeaker is referring to without look-ing everything up. Some physicistsmay automatically remember whatthey need, but for the rest of us, mem-orizing is an often overlooked tool.

I do not claim this list exhausts allof the missteps I have made. Butthese are the ones that occur to me asperhaps being common to many otherphysicists. And although I cannotclaim expertise in many areas, I dothink I know something about my ownshortcomings. At this stage of thegame, I have nothing to gain by hid-

ing from the truth.

Reference1. H. Stormer, Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, 875

(1998).

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