Environmental physics in the undergraduate physics curriculum

Earlier this week, the U.K.'s Physics World featured an excellent op-ed by Peter Hughes about environmental physics education.  He noted the importance of the topic, its practical value, and its incredibly wide disciplinary scope.  His definition, for example, is as follows.

Environmental physics is defined as the response of living organisms to their environment within the framework of the physics principles and processes. It examines the interactions within and between the biosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere, the geosphere and the atmosphere. Stretching from geophysics, meteorology and climate change to renewable energy and remote sensing, it also covers soils and vegetation, the urban and built environment, and the survival of humans and animals in extreme environments. 

He writes mainly from the perspective of the British university system.  One of his conclusions is "I believe a module on environmental physics should be a component of every undergraduate degree as a minimum, ideally having the same weight as quantum or statistical physics or optics."

While the thought is commendable, let's consider some reasons why it might not fly very far in the United States.

First, at many universities there already exist a robust academic ecosystem in the Earth and environmental sciences, with departments spanning soil physics in the school of agriculture, to atmospheric and oceanic sciences, geosciences, hydrology, civil and environmental engineering, and so on.  I live near a university where most of these disciplines have their own departments.  A physics student interested in this topic would be well advised to pick one of these disciplines as a minor or double major.  I personally find the multidiscplinary aspect of these fields to be quite exciting, but the key is to get out of the physics department and work directly with people who are well trained and active in one or more of these fields.

This leads to my second concern, which is that most physics faculty in the United States are ill equipped to teach or do research in any of these fields, with the possible exception of energy-related technologies.  I claim that within academia, environmental physics is primarily carried out by non-physicists (unless geophysicists are included - however, mostly they are found outside academic physics departments). Let's take a basic subject like fluid mechanics, which is essential for meteorology, climatology, and physical oceanography.  Most physicists have never taken a full class in this subject, and would hardly be qualified to teach one, given the outrageous things they teach about fluids in introductory physics classes.  A crowning example of this is the still often taught "explanation" of aerodynamic lift using Bernoulli's equation.  Granted, some physicists do work with fluid mechanics on a daily basis - plasma physicists, some astrophysicists, some condensed matter physicists, for example - but their focus is not necessarily on the aspects of fluids (like rotating frames of reference) relevant to environmental issues.

Third, it is difficult for me to imagine what, from this incredibly wide field of Earth and environmental physics, could be stuffed into a single undergraduate class.  It would end up being highly dependent on the individual professor teaching it.  I don't know if the Brits have managed to create a standardized curriculum for environmental physics.  

I see there are a few U.S. universities that involve their physics departments in environmental physics, but this is still rare here.  Kudos to them.  For the rest, the fastest way to get a program up and running is to partner with the other departments at the university that have been doing environmental physics from their birth.  In the longer run, physics departments would have to start hiring faculty explicitly in environmental physics.  It could take a decade or so to build a strong program, and not all departments would be well positioned to do so, especially given the hostile funding situation for academia currently prevalent in this country.

While I don't foresee environmental physics being on part with quantum physics, statistical physics, and optics, perhaps eventually it could be on par with solid state physics, astrophysics, or other elective physics courses in the undergraduate program.  However it would take a level of effort and commitment that may not be available in this time of shrinking enrollments and disappearing funding.

 

Mathematical fluid dynamics, revisited

In April I noted a piece in Scientific American about the work of 3 mathematicians on their work rigorously deriving the links among 3 levels of hierarchy involving the description of fluid dynamics.  Recently a really nice piece by Leila Sloman for Quanta magazine, on the same topic, has been making the rounds.  Again, it's worth checking out.

 

Physicists and astronomers honored on US postage stamps - Update!

Continuing the theme of my last post, let me call back a post from 2021, where I blogged about physicists and astronomers depicted on US postage stamps.  Back then I counted about a dozen such, and I conjectured about possible future honorees.  Top of my list among the latter was Nikola Tesla.  Well, this was an oversight on my part, as Tesla was indeed depicted on a 20 cent stamp in the American Inventors series, issued in 1983.  Also depicted on the same stamp is his induction motor.

I am grateful to this list for helping me identify Tesla's stamp. The list has a number of notable foreign stamps as well, but it is incomplete.  For example, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, American Nobel laureates in physics, David Wineland and Daniel Schechtman (both affiliated with NIST), are depicted on foreign postage stamps.

 

Physicists honored on US currency and coinage - Update!

Back in 2022, I blogged about physicists depicted on US currency and coinage; at the time I could only identify two (Ben Franklin and Dr. Sally Ride). Further I stated that I knew of no other scientists, engineers, or mathematicians so depicted, unless we count the polymathic Thomas Jefferson.

I am pleased to see that this year (2025), the American Women Quarters series has added a quarter for Dr. Vera Rubin, a central figure in the discovery of the "dark matter" problem.  This now makes a total of 3 physicists, one male on currency, and two female on coinage.  It is noted that Dr. Ride is the first known LGBT+ person, and Dr. Rubin the first Jewish person, depicted on US money.

Regarding engineers, I should have mentioned in my earlier post that President Herbert Hoover ($1 coin issued in 2014) was a mining engineer.  President Jimmy Carter was also an engineer by training (nuclear engineer in the Navy), but no coin for him has yet been issued.  He is presently the only deceased president for whom a $1 coin has not yet been issued).

Am I missing any others?

 

John R. Rice's "Future Scientific Software Systems"

Today I stumbled upon the slides of a presentation, "Future Scientific Software Systems", presented at the first IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Computational Science and Engineering, in October 1996 at Purdue University.  The presenter was John R. Rice (1934-2024), a distinguished professor of computer science at Purdue.

Some remarkable statements in the talk did not make it into the published version, which appeared the following year in the journal, IEEE Computational Science and Engineering. Slide 20, for example, states that Numerical Recipes is "Extremely successful commercially and a failure scientifically.  The lessons learned in the 1950s-1970s are ignored."  Under the bullet for Microsoft Excel, it simply says "Ditto".  Late in the slide, it says "Poor, unreliable, inefficient software can be a commercial success.  Most users have no reliable way to assess software quality."

Much has been written about the flaws of Microsoft Excel elsewhere, so I suspect there won't be much controversy over this statement.  Rice's claim about Numerical Recipes was a shock to my system when I first heard it (from Rice himself, though at a different forum). The first edition of NR (dating to 1986) was the bread and butter of the computational component of my undergraduate research project in 1994-1995; admittedly I had not had any formal training in computer science beyond high school at the time I was working on that project.  However, my elders seemed to treat NR as an authoritative source, and I had no reason to think otherwise until I heard Prof. Rice denounce it just a year or two later.  The fact that NR was written by users (albeit very sophisticated ones) rather than "professional" computer scientists or computational mathematicians, lent some plausibility to the claim.

About a decade later, when I was a working professional, I discovered empirically an example of one of NR's flaws.  I was trying to understand spectral analysis of unevenly spaced data, and NR promotes the Lomb-Scargle method.  I quickly discovered that this was a very active field of research, and there was a plethora of alternatives to Lomb-Scargle, though I didn't have the time to investigate them all and figure out which ones were the most fit for purpose for our work.  No hint of this rich literature is made in NR, not even in the third (2007) edition.  I had finally discovered evidence that what Rice had said a decade earlier might not just be the opinion of a disgruntled academic.  On the other hand, the community of "professionals" could be considered as having equally failed to provide a pragmatic alternative to NR to users.  

Returning to Rice's presentation, the slides after slide 20 start to look ahead in time.  The final slide (slide 33) is amusing as it is titled "High impact applications that won't happen". He predicts that "By 2015 we will not have simulations that are reliable and accurate for"

• Weather forecasts of several days
• Social interactions such as the economy, small groups, warfare, business growth
• Life forms of a single cell
• Geophysics such as earthquakes and volcano eruptions
• Climate
• Software engineering of large Fortran/C applications 

Here we are ten years after 2015, in 2025.  I think the list of applications that did not happen remains accurate, except possibly for the first bullet (weather forecasts).  He does not define how "reliable and accurate" such forecasts need to be, but I think it would be unfair to claim that we cannot make such forecasts reasonably well in 2025.

Rice looked ahead 20 years.  Could we see progress on the rest of the above list in the next twenty?  One thing Rice did not foresee is that simulations might come to be supplanted by artificial intelligence methods, such as large language models. We have already started to see AI encroach as a competitor to simulations in weather forecasting.  Alternatively, simulations and AI might find a way to work together to make progress on these kinds of problems.  I'm reluctant to be completely skeptical that no progress on the above list will be made in the next 20 years, though not necessarily by simulations alone.

 

Reference

J. R. Rice, 1997:  Future scientific software systems.  IEEE Computational Science and Engineering, April/June issue, pp. 44-48. 

Peter Lax, 1926-2025

As I noted just last month, DTLR does not dwell on mathematics very much, but a second exception seems just as warranted as my earlier post last month.  Today we learn of the passing of Abel Prize laureate Peter D. Lax (1926-2025), a retired professor at the Courant Institute at NYU, last Friday.  He was a highly accomplished pure and applied mathematician, who worked in the field of partial differential equations, and on numerical methods for their solution.  Much of this work has direct relevance to applied physics and engineering, including fluid dynamics.

Prof. Lax is also the only Abel Prize winner I have ever met in person.  It was just a brief meeting during a visit I made to the Courant Institute in the late 2000's on other business.  We did not exchange many words, but I was honored to meet him.

I've attended lectures by at least two other Abel Prize winners, S.R.S. Varadhan and the late John Nash, but did not meet them face to face.

I'll take this chance to mention my encounters with winners of the other major international prizes in mathematics.  As far as I know, I have neither met nor attended lectures by any of the Fields Medalists, except for Shing-Tung Yau.  As for the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, both Lax and Yau are the only ones I've personally encountered as noted.  Well, it must be evident that I don't attend math conferences or math lectures very often.

Bad philosophy or just an urge for glory?

I haven't read many of Carlo Rovelli's works, but I did enjoy an essay he published this month in Nature.  "There is a healthy sense of crisis in fundamental physics" he says, but he is dismayed by commonly seen demands for physics "beyond" the standard model, conventional quantum theory, and general relativity.  He thinks this is because of "bad philosophy" or mis-readings of philosophers of science such as Kuhn and Popper, who he claims are understood to endorse radical "overthrows" of existing theories and treating all speculative theories equally seriously until they've been falsified.  He argues that previous "paradigm shifts" are actually more "conservative" than commonly understood, and that despite this, radical new theories are driven primarily by confronting data not currently understood, as well as apparent contradictions among different pieces of knowledge.

It is a good and thought-provoking essay.  I basically agree with his point that the history of science is far more methodologically valuable to study than philosophy of science.  However I surmise that he's overthought the explanation for the craze for "physics beyond the standard model" (such as supersymmetry and string theory).  I think the more radical alternatives just have greater potential for scientific glory than more "conservative" approaches (such as loop quantum gravity, a field he worked in and seems to think is a "proof of concept" for an approach more closely tied to existing quantum theory and gravitational theories, though he points out some of its "radical" features).  Thus, the appeal of following the wilder approaches is the chance to attain heroic status.

I haven't summarized Rovelli's essay very eloquently; he writes very well and I recommend reading it.  Even though his should not be the final word (I'm certainly not convinced that the wilder speculative theories should be completely abandoned) but it's a good counterpoint to much of what we read, especially in accounts of popular physics.