WEI, Jian’s blog

I came across a blog mentioned about why Chinese students got good GRE physics scores. http://incoherently-scattered.blogspot.com/2008/01/graduate-admissions-acing-gre-physics.html

Some suggested that they practiced a lot with previous exam problem sets, and think that might be considered as cheating in American standards.

I just want to point out one obvious reason that many people in US might neglect. That is, for most physics majors, all the textbooks they used are in Chinese. So if one student does not study those previous GRE physics problem sets. He or she has no other way to quickly master all those special terms in physics.

If the exam problem sets were translated into Chinese, the level of difficulty is not a problem for advanced Chinese undergraduate students. About 10 years ago, I myself was preparing GRE physics while also preparing GRE general exam, TOEFL, and doing my experiments as a master degree student in Beijing University. I scored 970 (the maximum is 990) and was still laughed by a bunch of my classmates who got 990 without much effort. It was rare at that time to see someone got GRE physics score below 900 if he or she prepared for it seriously. I agree with those commented in the aforementioned blog that GRE physics score doesn’t have much correlation with future success in physics, which seems to be more about opportunities/luck to work in a productive group/area, and maybe the ability to manage research group. Otherwise we would see more successful Chinese PIs. And as a matter of fact many of my classmates left physics (for a richer life etc) and only a few are still struggling (as far as I know only one is exceptional and got an AP position in a good place).

People from Russian and many other European countries seem to have no problem with English literature. I learned to speak Russian during my college years. At that time Russian literature still had a strong influence in China for historic reasons, and I was too ambitious / naive and thought I should learn a second foreign language besides English. Today, I forgot most of what I learned, but one impression is that most scientific words are pronounced very similarly in Russian as in English. Also for Russian students, they usually have a very strong physics education and many of their textbooks, like the Landau theoretical physics series was translated into English and is considered one among the best textbook series.

Other countries/regions in Asia, like Korea, Taiwan, and Hongkong have a different situation than China. I leaned from a new Korea graduate student in our group that in Korea, they are using textbooks in English, and he says that he is more familiar with physics terms in English than the words translated into Korea, and most literature he read are in English. I also heard from a Korea laundry shop owner that she can teach her ABK (American born Korean) kid basic Korea in half a year, probably because Korean language can be spelled like English, while Chinese characters are more difficult from her experience. That could also explain why many ABC (American Born Chinese) have difficult to learn Chinese.

Right now in most Chinese universities textbooks in Chinese is still the only choice. Chinese people tend to follow traditions and resist changes. It is kind of a dilemma: if we use textbooks in English our own language might be consider inferior, which is not something people can be proud of; if keep Chinese as the working language, that means for most of the researchers they are disconnected from the rest of the world. China is a large country, in principle it is possible to develop our own system and keep using our own language. Historically, we have done that before in the Ming and Qing dynasties, when the empire of China had the largest GDP in the world. But in recent centuries, the scientific development happened so fast, and closing the door was proved not the choice. Recently my former MS degree advisor in Beijing University, now a retired professor, told me he is spending time on a committee in charge of translation between English and Chinese words in physics. I think that is a really meaningful effort.

In the future, when there are more and more returnees with PhD degree from US and other English speaking countries join the faculty, those young professors may start using textbooks in English, like what happened in Korea, Hongkong, and Taiwan. Hopefully then, the language barrier for Chinese students is not a problem any more.

High-risk high-reward research

The back page of Mar 2008 APS news features a preliminary report by the AAA&S committee about “physics tomorrow”. The authors discussed what needs to be done in terms of funding strategies. Two focuses are about supporting young physicists and supporting high-risk high-reward research.

One of the authors, Steve Chu, recently visited Northwestern to give the Heilborn lecture series. Students and postdocs were given a time slot to chat with him. I took the chance to ask him how, for young physicists, to embark on a high-risk high-reward (high impact) research, or how to find such a topic. He first clarified that h-r h-r research topics probably should be chosen by experienced PIs, and then he went on to talk about his own experience as a graduate student at Berkeley and as a researcher at Bell lab.

Then I and someone else asked whether or not it boils down to the money issue, i.e., if you have lots of money, can buy top-of-the-line equipment and hire talented people, then you can try thing risky. His answer is not necessary, again he use his own research as example, for bio related research, they only need some microscopes, no fancy equipments. However, he emphasized that talking to the right people (in bio) is very important.

He also says he encourages moonlight, i.e., to try your own ideas in evenings and weekends. Although useful for some, these suggestions probably are not practical for people in high energy experiment, or even people doing liquid helium experiment.

Another trick as Steve claimed is to steer your research to some new technology. He again talked about his own experience. In fact, in the autobiography by another Nobel laureate, Ahmed Zewail, it is also mentioned that combination of technique breakthrough and new concepts leads to high impact research.

One interesting remark by Steve: “try it out and fail fast. Fail in three weeks you have some fun; fail after three years is painful”. Again, this type of quick turnaround experiments doesn’t fit for all subfields but certainly fit for some.

In summary, I find this one hour meeting worthwhile and appreciate Steve to spend time with us and to share his research philosophy.

Be organized certainly helps. Nowadays, with the help of computers, things could be organized much more efficient. As a lab researcher, I find some database tools very useful and hope that similar software could see more and more usage for research groups and even departments.

Since 2004, I’ve been using phpbb forum to write down my thoughts and interesting ideas, also other things like modifications of the major equipments I was responsible for, and stuff related to some of our papers, like from which Origin file the figure was exported, and useful comments by others etc.

The phpbb forum is an open source software created in 2000. A friend of mine (Lifeng) first used it for the Chinese student community at Rutgers, and then I followed him to become the administrator of the forum in 2002. It is based on mySQL database and people can search the posts by keyword, by user name, and can also limit the range of search.

After playing with phpbb for a while, and become comfortable with php programming, I started to using it as my online lab notebook since 2004. After I graduated from Rutgers and started a postdoc at Northwestern, I paid $4 a month for a commercial webhosting service to continue my online notebook.  With commercial webhosting, the setting is much easier, and actually there are a lot other software available but I do not have time to explore them.

I’ve noticed that some groups are using internal wiki to keep useful information. From my point of view, phpbb forum is better than wiki for the purpose of a searchable notebook.  Although wiki is also based on database, you can only search for the entry words, not all the words in the posts. That is not what I wanted and I believe other researchers would also prefer to search the whole posts.  The wiki is more useful when people want to record the changes that had been done for editing the entries, which maybe important for a dictionary but not important for a lab notebook.

Comparing to online blogging software, again phpbb forum is more suitable for note saving.  In a phpbb forum, you can have a quite complicated hierarchy structure, like several different categories and then many forums under each category, and can set different privileges for users, and set the forums private or public accessible. For example, in a sub- forum of one particular equipment, other people in your group can also start a topic, e.g., about recent maintenance of the equipment, or some recent accident with the equipment etc.  In comparison, blogging is most of time a one man show and not very useful if you want more involvement from other group members. Also I am not sure about the searching function of the blog software.

Although phpforum is better than wiki and blog, I am not fully satisfied with it. It by all means was not designed for a scientific lab notebook. The ideal software for a lab notebook that I was hoping to find, should combine all the important things, like the links to device fabrication details, the links to devices SEM images, and test results, and other related comments for each single sample. And when I need the information for that sample or need to compare parameters for all related samples, the database will help to sort that out.

So far I haven’t found such software. Maybe it is already available for big companies. I’ve played with some open source software that available on the hosting website, like a Coppermine online photo album and a 4images online photo album (both similar to phpbb but designed for better handling of images) to store device images as well as some photos of instrument during maintenance.  However, they are not as useful as the phpbb forum for me since those images are not well linked, e.g., to the device description and data.

 Most professors probably have spent quite some time on how to store their group’s data and how to organize them, and many students and postdocs probably have the experience of struggling with poor documented equipments. I am wondering, is it feasible that the University can provide each group some database service like the phpbb forum I’ve been using, but maybe more powerful. That would certainly improve the productivity of the research and has also other benefits like prevent scientific misconducts because all the data are in the database and nobody can say that his databook was eaten by mice or lost to nowhere.

In fact, at Rutgers before I left, I’ve noticed that the administration have made a better university homepage and tried to standardize all the department homepages, and also started a new myRutgers portal for every student with integrated services like email, calendar, course registration etc. That portal service probably could be modified and be useful for a research group.  However, since the service is provided by a department within the administration, I am not sure whether they could be as efficient as commercial service provider, although they may provide more customized service.   At Northwetsern, I’ve noticed that the old university email system has been replaced with service by gmail, which is very helpful because gmail has a large mailbox and has database functions like search and categorization etc.

Another useful and very simple tool for a group is an email listserv. I’ve been the listserv administrator for Chinese student Association at Rutgers from 2000 to maybe 2004, so I am also familiar with this tool.  With a listserv, the group members won’t need to collect a bunch of email addresses and each individual can also change their email address without worrying about missing emails.  I noticed some professors with a large group are using this tool, e.g., Tobin Marks’ group at NWU, http://chemgroups.northwestern.edu/marks/directory.html.

Some departments have used event calendars, research description, and alumni info etc, based on database.  One of the exceptional is the UIUC chemistry department; they even have nice photos of every faculty members, http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/chem/.  I think that is a very good strategy in terms of recruiting new students and new faculty members.

In summary, I think that using database software can help individual researchers, research groups, and departments to be better organized.  And I believe better organized means improved productivity and more chance to success.

If you were able to start over as an undergraduate again, what kind of professor you would choose to study/work with? Or, if you were to become a professor, what kind of professor you would like to be? This kind of questions recurred to me from time to time.  So whenever possible, I am always interested to observe how different professors teach their courses and lead their groups.

I believe that a good educator has to be well-trained and well-prepared. I probably got that belief from my earlier unsuccessful mentoring experience. More than 10 years ago, started from my college years, I always wanted to give my younger sister (then in high school) and other younger relatives some useful suggestions in terms of study and career plan etc. However, since I myself didn’t have much experience so I had little to offer, although I really wished to be a good mentor.  At that time, my sister was thankful for my encourage and supports, but probably also felt bored by my useless suggestions

Back to the topic of professor/undergraduate student issue, here are my opinions about being a good (physics) teacher.

About teaching: When teaching a course, always give a detailed syllabus. Tell the students the reason that you choose the particular textbook; what is your strength in teaching this course, e.g.,  the parts related to your research; what do you want them to grasp from this course and the connections with other parts of the field. If you know there are some good online sources, like lectures videos by some wonderful teachers, ask the students to watch and read. Sometimes, a study group is more useful than class teaching in terms of answering specific questions of a student.

About research: Encourage collaboration between students while also reward individual creativity.  Should let students know, that any advance of science is based on a lot of work by others, and if they are interested in doing science they should learn to collaborate with each other and learn to initiate collaboration (as in other businesses). When doing real research project, for most undergraduates, the first project is better to be a small topic, and should be in collaboration with senior members (gs, postdoc, prof) in the group.  Publishing a first-author paper certainly can be a strong incentive for an undergraduate student, but without input from others, the process can be very slow and painful.  For an undergraduate with limited time, he/she can collaborate with other students and finish one project together, and all as co-authors.  They should be informed that the main purpose for an undergraduate project is to get a taste of doing research and understand the physics. Usually only for simple projects exploring new fields (e.g., nano stuff), can they make substantial contributions.  For more difficult projects in those more matured fields, the undergraduate’s involvement probably won’t contribute too much, or even may delay the progress.

One additional thought about the collaboration with others: besides participating student organizations, I think the ability could be also acquired from participating sports like soccer etc. I myself like to play soccer, and feel organizing an offense attack is pretty much like collaboration in a project, although for me most of time the former is easier and more fun

As I mentioned before, I kind of like more textbooks used U.S. since they are usually written in more details, with many references, and sometimes with historic context. Although not succinct as those I used back in China (mostly translated, and shortened version), they are easier for students to self-study and to have a coherent picture. Also, if later someone want to refresh his/her memory, it is easier to pickup.

In this sense, now there are excellent complementary resources for learning on wiki, since one entry usually links to many related entries, even in different disciplines, e.g., math and physics. Here is an example.

http://www.answers.com/topic/wkb-approximation

Another one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_lamp

It combines engineering, invention, surface science, biophysics all together. In fact, the in situ plasma etching used in the evaporators in our lab are based on similar principles.

For current students and teachers, another wonderful thing is online book reviews. It can bring relief when you see many people have similar confusions, and understand there are probably always some problems and limitations with even the very popular textbooks. Sometimes, the reviewer seems has deeper understanding of the material than most of us, and the reviews seem truly illuminating, e.g.

http://www.amazon.com/Classical-Mechanics-3rd-Herbert-Goldstein/dp/0201657023

Most of the textbooks have many homework problems. My personal opinion, more homework won’t help students to understand deeper the physics. Right now the life of undergraduates is more than ever busy, if spend more than a few hours and still couldn’t get a hint to solve the problem, then it is not worthy it. I guess the tradition of problem solving is rooted back to applying the knowledge to solve practical issues. Although it is very useful to actually solve a few problems, it is not worth the time to try many of them just to be familiar with the problem solving technique. Instead, it might be better to spend the time to read some historic context, or related mathematics, so can have a more coherent picture. As for the technique, you will forget it anyway unless you use it all the time.

It is not uncommon to hear about complains that undergraduate courses are difficult to teach, and the students always hate to solve problems. Some said it is important to choose how much/deep the material in textbook should be covered. I think it is not how much the students have learned that matters, but how well they understand the derivation of the subject and its position in the broader physics/science context. Of cause, it is easier said that done.

About learning physics, and keep the students’ interest in physics, professor Carl Wieman has some very interesting opinion: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200711/backpage.cfm

(Though, I am curious about the percentage of faculty members who “have the desire to have a clear and sincere desire to have their students learn physics and appreciate its usefulness and inherent intellectual beauty.”)

This is not only for students in physics major. 10 years ago, my wife was studying international corporation management in a prestigious University, she and her classmates had problem reading those Chinese Textbooks, which are no more than just translation and editing of standard textbooks in English. However, the translation is very difficult to understand and most of the students were just confused and lost their interest.

That was 10 years ago but I am pretty sure the same thing happens now as long as there are no enough professors who can teach with the textbooks in English.

The situation probably is better for physics major because it is somewhat dissociated from the society context. However, although students had no problem learning most of the fundamental courses in the undergraduate level, but later on it is a big obstacle when they do research since English is the communication language, and mostly people will refer to textbook in English if they need.

Not only that affects the learning process, it also makes interdisciplinary research quite difficult. For example, I am doing condensed matter physics, if I want to do something related organic thin films, or bio-related experiments. Reading related literature will be difficult since I do not know the specific terms in English. Of cause you can say if I am very determined I should spend time to re-learn these, but everyone knows the life of a researcher nowadays is busy. Another example, I’ve a friend in biology department doing some research with stem cell project and he uses some equipment with amplifiers, and he found it a problem to understand all the electronics since he already forgot those things learned in college. If the manual is in Chinese, probably he can still understand something, but since it is in English he felt it is too time consuming to understand it at all.  

I am not saying I do not like Chinese language. In fact, I do believe Chinese characters have their own beauty and can express much more feelings than alphabet characters. However, as when the center of science moved from Europe to American, the communication language is changed from German to English, the only way to catch the progress is to learn as much as possible with the current communication language. For China, it is an easier choice to teach things in Chinese, but later on the students have to pay more to be able to do real research. Many Chinese textbooks are just a concise version of the English textbook (or Russian textbook), although similar but lost the favor of original text. And sometimes, the historic context is omitted which makes the book very technical and the students do not know where the stuff comes from.

Recently, when coming back to China in 2005, I noticed improvements that new “auxiliary” books with more historic backgrounds are available, and the English names of the theories are included within parentheses. This helps since at least students can recognize the corresponding English names of the theory. But I still prefer to use the current original textbooks, and if the professors do have their opinions they can publish some notes. The bad thing is some professors just consider publishing a textbook as a big achievement and can be used to get higher salaries etc.

One more step ahead, is to utilize the resource in this Internet era. There are online videos courses taught by some first-class scholars (e.g. linear algebra http://web.mit.edu/18.06/www/Video/video-fall-99.html ). I can’t see any reason why not use this as the standard “class material” and the professors are just responsible to answer questions and provide more specific guidance to the students. That would be a big change of the classroom, but I believe that is far more efficient for spreading knowledge.

For future students exposed to English textbooks earlier, I believe they will have more interest and more contributions later.

Recently, attended a lecture by Nobel laureate Steve Weinberg. When asked about what if the new high energy collider doesn’t give any new result, he says something like “then there is nothing else to do” which sounds like the end of high energy physics or the ultimate physics. He joked that he doesn’t like condensed matter physics because that is too human (not pure physics). It seems that he still is unhappy with PWA about the fact that Phil made some statements against spending money on big collider project (the SC).

When asked about the inter-fertilization between different disciplines even within physics, he says at most people can learn some techniques from different fields, but not the ideas. And he believes that it is natural that people within each sub-field of physics can’t understand each other since nowadays most people are specialized in a very small area.

For the first opinion, personally, I agree with PWA (and probably Feynman) about “more is different/there is plenty of room at the bottom”, there are interesting things/new paradigms at levels higher than particle physics. For particle physicists, it is probably close to the ultimate high-energy experiment that can be done on earth, the next available thing is cosmology. But for condensed mater physics, there are still lots of things worth to research on although not as fundamental as particle physics.

For the second one, although I really hope there be more places/institutes that can allow many people from different fields to exchange their ideas and create new physics, but in reality, I think most people are just too busy with his own research in a small field and won’t have time to look outside his/her field. If even top theorists don’t think they can learn things from each other, then it is more difficult for experimentalists since there are money and manpower issues. For example, in bio-physics, many people doing physics are interested in this but just do not want to risk too much since it is hard to find a niche that suits their expertise.

Government is always the biggest investor of interdisciplinary research. But now for U.S., probably because it is becoming an “old” society, or because there is no pressure from the outside (like soviet union), there is a tendency to cut funding for fundamental research. Like in an old Chinese saying: when all hares were killed, there is no use of arc and arrow. As the only superpower in the world, its people might just want to shut its door to outside, like what ancient China has done. It seems true that when the society becomes old, it won’t value those who wanted to explore new things; instead, it values order and good services. I remember that one high level officer from China said, right now only in China, Taiwan and Korea, the government is still increasing funding for fundamental research. If this trend keeps, maybe there is more chance for future physics in these countries.  

I have observed an interesting phenomenon: few of physics students want to join a traditional lab that mainly does transport measurements.

A probably extreme situation happens in the department I got my PhD in a nice public university. The department directory listed 17 faculty members in condensed matter experiment group, 3 associated faculty members, but only 8 graduate students. And among the listed 8 students, I personally know one already defended and left, two are planning to do that next year, and one is taking time off. Although some faculty members have students from other departments, and some students may be not listed, but still the ratio is less than one student for each faculty members.

The situation seems a little better in the place that I am staying as a postdoc, a private university. The department directory listed 7 members in the condensed matter experiment group, but doesn’t separate graduate students from different sub-fields. In our lab that does low temperature experiment, we only have one 6^th year graduate student who is leaving the next year. Since the labs are close, I know the situation of other three groups out of the 7. Two have two students and one has probably 6 (really an exception). However, here it seems each group occupies much larger lab space and in principle can accommodate more people.

Isn’t it a little waste of the resource? It is true that the competition in the academy is hard, and getting a PhD in physics is probably no longer a good career choice.  But for a group, without incoming students, besides the funding issue, a lot of lab know-how will be lost that makes it more difficult to get new students. Anything can change this? Be more open-minded and encourage students to go to industry?  I do not know the answer.

During years of research at graduate school, I become aware that there are many mistakes in the literature, sometimes even wrong results got published and got more citations than the right ones. However, usually nobody will tell you exactly which are wrong and you just easily got lost in the large amount of literature that keeps piling up.

To save us some precious time so we can enjoy doing something else, e.g. blogging here, we could use a literature system that marks clearly which paper is the classic one and which one is just wrong. In a sense this is like a review system by experts and could look like a tree graph with the classical paper at the beginning of the tree.

The APS online PR series already benefit us a lot with the citing article links. But a database can be more useful if there is some guidance to it, e.g. an extra mark for each paper showing the importance, the originality of the paper etc. The overall efficiency of the scientific community can be much higher this way.

Although this sounds like a sweet dream, but there is indeed something similar in the mathematician’s community, check this http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/. Although this is about people not about papers, similar plot could be also useful for physics students.