I fell behind on course reports from my modern physics class a few weeks back, but I do mean to get back to them, when I have more time. The material remaining is the end-of-term sprint through a bunch of topics in modern physics– three classes on atoms and molecules, three classes on solid state physics, three classes on nuclear and particle physics.
It’s a mad dash through a lot of material (as the eventual course-wrap-up post will make clear), which raises one of the eternal questions of academia:
When teaching undergraduate students about a discipline, which is more important, breadth or depth?
That is, is it better for students to know a lot about a couple of fields, or a little about everything?
You can find both approaches in different parts of academia. My own undergraduate education went for depth– there were multiple faculty members who did research in AMO physics, so the curriculum had a strong focus on optics and atoms, but I never had any classes on nuclear or particle physics. Union’s curriculum goes the other way, with a “modern physics” class that attempts to cover as many fields as possible, at the cost of not going into much depth about any of them.
Each approach has its pros and cons, and it’s not clear to me that one is strongly preferable to the other. I’m curious about what other people think, though. So if you were designing your ideal science curriculum, which would you go for?