Smoke Signals from a Kindred Spirit

I feel like writing something that isn’t about Christianity or tools.

I have never completely given up my interest in math and physics. I quit graduate school in 1996 because the University of Texas and ADD drugs had pretty much crushed my soul, but I have kept all my texts, other than the ones ants ate in Miami, and I still do problems from time to time. I remember about 5% of what I learned. I can’t understand a lot of my old homework papers. Still, I am way ahead of a typical college graduate, and I like to use what remains of my old skills.

If you told me I had to take the midterm and final for a calculus class, I could be ready to nail them in a month. Same should go for what is known as “University Physics.” That’s about the best I can say for myself. I wouldn’t even be able to read a graduate-level quantum exam.

Sometimes I watch science videos on Youtube. There are some excellent lectures available. It’s no exaggeration to say that a smart person could use Youtube and Amazon to get the equivalent of a Ph.D. without ever applying to graduate school. A really disciplined person could copy down the curricula from a couple of good institutions, go through the courses online, and end up just as able as someone who studied at a university.

Because I occasionally watch this stuff, Youtube suggests STEM videos from time to time. The other day, it suggested videos by Andrew Dotson, a man who is currently in graduate school. His videos are about the physics grad school experience, which, I hope, is like no other. I hope medical students and math students and so on are not as miserable as physics students. Law students aren’t; I can tell you that. I did virtually nothing in law school, had a great time, and graduated cum laude.

A high percentage of physicists are incredibly bad teachers. There is no way to make you understand how bad they are unless you’ve been there. There are some wonderful instructors out there, but many professors, especially those who write textbooks, are really obstacles to your success. They hurt more than they help.

Here’s a story I like to tell people about my experience. I took Quantum Mechanics at UT. The undergrad version is very hard. The graduate version is exponentially worse. My professor gave us a set of homework problems one week. One of the problems was so hard, I refused to try to write out the endless pages of vector mathematics that gushed out of it. I knew it would be so cumbersome it would be nearly impossible to write or read. I got so desperate, I splurged on Mathematica, a math program which, I hoped, would spew out and print the math for me.

It was a nightmare.

At some point, I talked to my professor about it. He said, “I couldn’t solve that one. How did you do with it?”

This is not an exceptional physics story. It’s totally normal.

Physics is very hard even when you have good teachers. At the University of Miami, my undergrad teachers were generally good. Some were fantastic. I had one guy, Harry Robertson, who was so bad he actually caused a riot in the 1950’s. He gave an exam and failed most of an undergrad class, and they drove their cars around campus, honking their horns to protest. This was long before protesting was cool. I always thought he was sadistic. He never showed any sympathy when people complained. I took his Mechanics class (because I didn’t know about him), and nearly everyone, including grad students, pretty much died on the first exam. We talked to him as a group. He actually laughed at my entire class as if we were complaining about a pea under a mattress. Our futures were on the line, and he truly thought our distress was amusing. Strange guy.

You would think that once a professor causes a riot, his university would take some sort of action to improve his teaching methods, but I took his class around 35 years after the riot, and he hadn’t changed. He just smirked at us. Smirking was just about the only facial expression we saw from him. He was in his seventies and looked ten years older, so it was strange to see such apparent immaturity.

Here’s a fact: when most of a class fails a test, the professor is the problem. You can lose 10% of your class because they’re lazy or simply not smart enough. You can’t lose most of them. In order to get into the class, they had to prove they were qualified, and they were not failing all of their other classes.

He used a book written by a couple of guys named Fetter and Walecka. There are lots of great mechanics books out there, notably Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics, but he picked the worst one in existence. It was not much better than having no book at all. My wild guess is that either Fetter or Walecka was one of his buddies. Or maybe he hadn’t bothered to read it because he cared so little about his students. The book was total garbage, so between the instructor and the book, we were really up against it.

When my Mechanics class bombed on the first test, Robertson’s defense was that one Chinese guy got a good grade. He didn’t ask himself how much help this student got from the Chinese government, which was paying his tuition and expenses. For all he knew, this student was faxing his homework to China so government employees could help him do well. Or maybe he was a true genius. But you don’t flunk most of a class simply because Norbert Wiener strolls in and aces your test.

There is no such thing as an independent Chinese exchange student. They are government projects from a collectivist culture. They don’t just send them over here and let them flounder, or rebel, on their own.

Regarding Robertson’s demeanor and behavior, it’s not exactly rare for STEM people to have no social skills, and sadism is not unusual, either. My undergrad advisor had a touch of it. Most people don’t get a brain with two big halves. If you’re a mathematical genius, you probably won’t break the 60th percentile on the verbal SAT, and you will probably have trouble forming normal relationships. Of course, there are many exceptions. I was one of them. I’m not saying I was a math genius, but I was capable of doing physics well, and I also had a very high verbal aptitude. In physics, I got to know (or at least be acquainted with) a lot of guys who were missing some important psychological components.

You may need to click the gif to make it work.

It’s disturbing to realize that technology, which rules our lives, is in the hands of people who are generally somewhat maladjusted and often extremely hostile. Nothing can be done about it, though.

I quit physics, and it hurt a lot, because I knew I could succeed with a little time and rest. It’s a good thing I quit, because physicists are generally unhappy in their careers, not just in graduate school. But no one likes to fly close to the sun and then plummet to the sidewalk.

I had a legitimate medical problem which made studying very difficult. I was full of drugs that made sleep impossible and had all sorts of powerful emotional effects. UT was not helpful. Their main concern was getting sued. A professor named David Gavenda had had some kind of run-in with an undergrad who was being treated for ADD, and when I went to the department for help, they mentioned Gavenda more than once. They processed students the way a Perdue plant processes chickens, and they did not want any grit in the machinery. If students dedicated years of undergrad study to physics and then moved across the country to study at UT, and if the school’s unwillingness to provide any assistance when they were in need caused them great hardship, it was not important. It wasn’t that UT wanted to hurt them. It was just the inconvenience to the list, as the Nazi officer in Schindler’s List said concerning his unwillingness to help Itzhak Stern get off the train to Auschwitz.

The professor who was supposed to be helping me was Tom Griffy. He was an avuncular Oklahoman who seemed like a great guy at first, but the impression I got whenever I probed for signs of support was that his only concern was to do the least he could do for me in order to prevent an ADA lawsuit. It was extremely obvious that he was being advised by attorneys, not educators.

I was sleeping one or two hours per day at best, and I was under tremendous stress. I asked to be allowed to drop a course and concentrate on another course I felt I could do well in. His response was to force me to take a D in the course I wanted to drop. In the end, after I had to take a medical leave because a misguided doctor tried to treat my ADD with Prozac, he took away my teaching job and said I could only stay if I agreed to settle for a master’s degree.

He did do me one favor. He gave his E&M class a take-home exam, and my computer crashed while I was working on it, so I had to start over by hand. After I submitted the result, my computer functioned again, and I printed out the answer I had originally intended to give him. I put it in his faculty mail box just so he would realize I was not a moron. To my amazement, he accepted it even though it was late. That was a grand gesture by UT standards, and I did appreciate it.

Dealing with the school showed me, repeatedly, exactly how I measured up in the ecosystem. I was getting $15 per hour to tutor students privately. UT contacted the grad students and asked us if we wanted to tutor their athletes for less than half of that. Bag boys at the grocery a few blocks from my apartment made more. Kaplan was paying $12.

When I went to the student pharmacy to get my Ritalin prescription filled, a lady who worked there told me they had it, but I couldn’t have it. She said it was discrimination. That’s the word she used. She said they had a female athlete who was taking huge doses, and she got all the Ritalin. You know how that works. The athlete probably didn’t graduate, and if she did, she’s probably stocking shelves at a store somewhere. She was still important, because UT was all about sports.

It was truly bizarre. Like any university, UT had a socialist mindset, so they provided inexpensive medical insurance which was supposed to cover just about any need I had. And I could not use it. I had to go to pharmacies and pay full retail for drugs. They never tried to explain this. Good thing I didn’t have cancer. Maybe Bevo, UT’s mascot, might have come down with bovine leukemia, and he would have gotten my chemotherapy drugs.

UT had a reputation for treating students like worthless and fungible objects, so I could not say I had not been warned.

There is no way to make other people understand how miserable I was after things went sour at UT. I did not have a single friend, which is not unusual for grad students in physics. I couldn’t even get away from my stress by sleeping, because the pills would not permit it. I actually found myself lying in bed making a sort of rocking motion to distract myself, like a zoo animal that had been kept isolated for 20 years. It was the best I could do.

I had pinned all my hopes on physics, so I had no other plan for my life. Law school wasn’t a tantalizing, prestigious alternative. To me, it was like running home and flipping burgers.

I was away from God, so when I prayed, I felt as though I were in a concrete cistern and the prayers bounced off the ceiling.

When you don’t even have God to talk to, you have serious problems.

Since leaving UT, I have had no one to talk to about my experience. I can tell people about it, but they can’t understand.

Youtube surprised me with promoting Andrew Dotson’s videos, and I’ve watched several. It’s crazy to see how right I was about grad school. People have gaslighted me, trying to make me feel I wasn’t physics material, and some have said the teaching and books weren’t the problem. Now I have someone who confirms what I’ve said. I’ve never really had that before. For some reason, many people defend the physics education apparatus, and that’s completely nuts.

The other day, I saw a thumbnail for one of his videos, and I saw that it was supposedly about the most infamous graduate text. I knew instantly what he had to be talking about! Classical Electrodynamics, by J.D. Jackson. This was the book Tom Griffy used. Behind the scenes, the graduate students advised each other to read books by people like Leonard Eyges.

I don’t know where to start criticizing Jackson.

Jackson had a hard act to follow. My undergrad E&M book was written by a man named Griffiths. His book was extraordinary. It started with pages of mathematical preparation. Then he explained physics pretty well. His problems were chosen wisely, too. Someone must not have told him the proper way to write a physics book.

Jackson abandoned mks units for cgs (centimeter-gram-second). Why? I had been using mks (meter-kilogram-second) for several years. Every other class I took used mks. There is nothing wrong with mks. Griffiths used it. Someone tried to tell me it was because centimeters were more useful for the small measurements in E&M. Seriously? Can you really “see” a light wavelength in your mind’s eye? They’re measured in nanometers. Is it really helpful to measure them in nanometers times a hundred? You can’t imagine either measurement, so why not stick to the system every other course uses?

The big issue was that Jackson didn’t explain anything. Also, his problems were diabolically hard.

If you’re not going to explain anything, what is the purpose of your textbook?

There is no satisfactory answer to that question.

Here are some snippets from glowing reviews on the book’s Amazon page:

“[A]lmost no exposition is given for the concepts presented in the book.”

“Pedagogically, the book is about as bad as it gets.”

“[I]t doesn’t teach it at all, it just holds you accountable for it.”

“Sometimes he skips about 20 steps and tells you it’s obvious how he got to the next equation. Even my professor and TA could not explain how Jackson arrived at some of his equations.”

“Folks, find something else to use for education! This book is for someone who knows EM and needs a reference. It has no place in a classroom.”

“wtf some one write a new book.”

“There’s got to be a better way. But I’m told this is the best out there. Very depressing.”

“This is without a doubt the absolute worst textbook I have ever used. The material is presented is a random illogical order, as if it were written with the sole purpose to confuse readers.”

“The only reason this stinking rotting pile of crap is used in American universities is because the professors themselves were forced to use this book.”

Perhaps the best comment, from a physics professor:

“As a course text it is a bad choice and the tradition of using it is akin to hazing. Those who continue to teach lecture courses using Jackson are lazy.”

I always say math is much easier than physics. That’s not really true, of course. Math seems much easier than physics when you’re studying it. Why? Several reasons.

First, when you study an area of math, and you get homework problems, you know what kind of math you’re going to be using. If you’re studying calculus I, you know you’re not going to have to do a contour integral. Physics…not the same. You can’t even guess what kind of math you’re going to need until you see the problem.

Second, physics requires you to understand how the physical world works. If you can’t draw a picture and come up with a physical model that makes sense, you can’t even define the problem. Math doesn’t work like that. They just give you an expression or two and tell you what to do to them. It’s all handed to you.

Third, math problems generally have answers. I’ve never had a math professor give me a problem he knew had no answer. Physics professors do that all the time. Not helpful, when you’re already doing 30 hours of homework a week. You start in on a problem at 5 p.m., assuming it will take 45 minutes, and at 3 a.m., you’re still banging away at it, ignoring other problems you can actually solve, because you think that if it was assigned to you, there has to be an answer.

I had a professor assign a problem with an integral that diverged, and he didn’t tell us the answer was nonsense. What’s the point?

Fourth, math professors and their books explain things. I can’t understand why physics people are different. A math book will give you a long derivation to study. Someone like Jackson will omit it and tell you to figure it out yourself as an exercise.

Fifth, physics professors think it’s perfectly fine to give an exam on which a 30 is an A. Everyone in the class walks out thinking they’ve failed, they feel depressed until the grades come in, and then they find out the only guy who got a high score is the Chinese guy who never leaves his Chinese-government-subsidized dorm room.

Here’s something funny about physics: when a math instructor teaches a subject, he gives it a week or a month or a semester. If a physics professor knows you need to have a certain skill AND he condescends to show it to you, he will slap it on the board and devote maybe 20 minutes to it. What a math student learns over a period of days, you have to absorb in a few minutes.

Math isn’t always easier than physics. It’s as hard as you want to make it, and…you don’t have to make it hard. You can get an undergrad degree in math, taking courses that are much easier than physics courses, but if you deliberately look for hard subjects, you can torment yourself pretty badly.

I have a math minor, which means I have all the credits for a math degree, except that I was advised to take a certain course instead of another course that would have made me a math major. I don’t know how many credits I have, but if a math major was required to have 45, for example, that’s how many I have. I used to do maybe 4 hours of math homework per week, and I never had a problem. Undergrad physics took up at least three times that long.

I’m sure there were math courses that would have been more challenging. Graduate-level course, I would imagine. I didn’t take them.

I never took one hard math course, and I did complex variables, real analysis, partial differential equations…the works. Physics made everything seem easy.

To get back to the videos, here is Andrew Dotson’s video on J.D. Jackson. If you’re still reading, you may find it amusing. For me, it was vindication. There may be profanity; I can’t remember.

Here’s his video on the difference between undergrad and graduate courses in physics. It’s 100% true.

I was a little intimidated when I heard him talking about his work. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said. Then I looked him up. He got his degree from Old Dominion, which is not quite Harvard, and he’s studying at New Mexico State University. I looked the school up, and it’s ranked 124 by US News and World Report. When I studied at UT, it was ranked 22. He got rejected by lots of places. He can’t be any better than I was. I guess I just don’t remember all the things he talks about in his videos, so I feel as though I’ve never studied them.

I cannot remember anything about Bessel functions. Not for the life of me. I assume I must have encountered them.

Why am I writing this? I suppose it’s because it’s so rare for anyone to touch these particular nerves.

I’m going to try to quit watching his videos, but I did break down and buy a new copy of Mathews and Walker, to replace the one the ants ate. I don’t know if I’ll use it. I’m just mad at the ants. RE the ants, I want closure.

I hope this young man does well. He has chosen a very hard road which pays very poorly considering how long it takes to become qualified and how extreme the qualifications are.