Class Notes

I realize that I’ve been pretty bad about posting articles with explanatory physics content (even neglecting a couple of things that I promised to post a while back), but I have a good reason. All of my explanatory physics effort these days has been going into lecture writing, such as the two hours I spent Tuesday night writing up a lecture on the Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment.

This Quantum Optics class is turning out to be a really interesting experience. It’s a truism that you don’t really find out what you know about a subject until you have to teach it to someone else. That’s especially true here, because I couldn’t find a textbook at exactly the right level for the class I have in mind, so I can’t even fall back on just rote repetition of the book– I’ve got a couple of graduate-level descriptions of the material, and a couple of pop-science level descriptions, and I have to work back and forth between them to figure out how to pitch the subject to an upper-level undergrad audience.

It’s a real challenge, but it’s also kind of fun, and I now have a better understanding of coherence and correlation functions than I ever did before. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that information, but I’ve learned worse things this week (for example, I’ve learned of the existence of this).

(More rambling after the cut.)

The other nice thing about this class is that it’s all mine. I’m not bound to follow any particular syllabus, for the first time in about three years– all the classes I’ve taught in the last few years have had a set syllabus, either because I had one section of several, and thus needed to keep pace with the other sections, or because the class serves as a prerequisite for other courses, which sets a lower limit on the amount of material that needs to be covered.

I’m trying to keep this in mind, but I don’t always succeed, as with Wednesday’s class, where I really pushed to get through (most of) a derivation of Fermi’s Golden Rule, lest I fall behind my mental image of the course. Which is ridiculous, of course, because this is a junior/senior elective class, and no future class in our department depends on what I’m doing. So, if I don’t get all the way through an explanation of Shor’s factoring algorithm, well, they’ll just have to learn it in grad school.

What’s not fun about this term is that my Quantum Optics class is followed by my Introductory E&M class, with only a ten-minute break between them. That’s a rough gear change to make that quickly– I’ve taught E&M before, and can pretty much just re-use the PowerPoints from the last time I did it, but there’s still some rapid mental reconfiguration required to go from talking about Rabi oscillations and the Bloch sphere to “These are electric field lines…”

This may kill me, before the term is over (also, there are now seventeen (17!!!) students in my Quantum Optics class, which I foolishly agreed to make a writing-intensive class (and thanks so much to Scott Eric Kaufman for reminding me what I have to look forward to…)), but I’m kind of enjoying myself at the moment.