Update: Patrick says I’m very senstive. Which I certainly am. And as Patrick says, what Clifford is doing with the course sounds very very cool. So take this post with a grain of salt, or as an indication of what happens when I wake up on the wrong side of the bed (or the world?)
Update, update: Well it turns out that the answer to my question was neither (a),(b), or (c)! See the comments for the answer!
Clifford over at Cosmic Variance, tells a story
The semester started, and I showed up to teach what I thought was supposed to be the second part of a graduate string theory class, as long promised.
…
The first warning sign was that I looked on the online schedule to see where my class was to be held (small classes often end up in surprise mystery buildings all over campus…I like this because I get to learn of new teaching spaces over in the Humanities territories, for example), and saw that the title of the course was something like “Introduction to Relativistic Field Theory”.
…
So I showed up for the first class (this is three weeks ago now), and sure enough, there are the six or seven graduate students from Nick’s class…. but there are four or five students from the condensed matter group, and from the quantum information groups, part of CSI (I kid you not) over in Electrical Engineering! They saw a course with that title and, understandably, thought it was a good chance to learn some Relativistic Field Theory.
Which perplexs me. Is Clifford (a) confused that quantum information is part of the Communication Science Institute, (b) shocked that quantum information science is “relegated” to Electrical Engineering, or (c) dismayed that there are smart people in quantum information science who are interested in learning relativistic field theory, because, you know, quantum information science is just linear algebra and all?
So sensitive! If you’re planning on a teaching a beyond-perturbation string theory course it would be a bit of a shock to find a good fraction of your class consists of information theorists. Reading the rest of Clifford’s story, it sounds like he’s doing an admirable job of designing a course of interest and value to the wide variety of students he unexpectedly found himself teaching. I send kudos.
Hi David,
The “I kid you not” comment was simply because the group their in is called “CSI” which is the name of a TV show about forensic scientists, which I’d been talking about in an earlier post on the same blog. So nothing sinister there. Actually, I am very very excited about the fact that we have several people in EE and EE systems at USC who are doing quantum information. Some of these people have complemimentary cross-appoinments in physics because it is very natural (some of them are physicists by training). Quantum information is a wave of the future….it is an honor to teach some of the students from that area and maybe help them develop a little of the way physicists think….maybe it will show up in their futre work in some useful way….
Thanks Patrick, and David.
Cheers,
-cvj
Definitely kudos for what he is doing. I hope I didn’t imply otherwise.
By the way…I updated my post a touch to reduce the ambiguity of the remark.
cheers,
-cvj
Thanks cvj,
Im a complete idiot. Oh well, everyone already knew that already!
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