The other day I was browsing the magazine rack when I notice that the U.S. News and World Report Graduate school rankings. A sucker for elitism, I, of course, checked out the rankings. Even if they mean nothing they sure taste good going down my ego pipe 😉 But what was interesting to me was the in the Physics rankings, they rank seven specialties: Atomic/Molecular/Optical, Condensed Matter, Cosmology/Relativity/Gravity, Elemenary Particles/Fields/String Theory, Nuclear, Plasma,……and Quantum! Can you believe that? Here is the U.S. News rankings for the Physics subcategory of Quantum:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Harvard University (MA)
3. California Institute of Technology
4. Stanford University (CA)
5. University of California–Berkeley
6. University of California–Santa Barbara
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
8. Princeton University (NJ)
9. Yale University (CT)
10. Cornell University (NY)
University of Colorado–Boulder
University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign
University of Maryland–College Park
Okay, well I don’t agree with these rankings, mostly because they depend on a lot of different factors (theory? experiment? etc.) and in “Quantum” you lose a lot by not having international rankings (especially in theory, but also in experiment.) It seems that a few of the schools (*ahem, you know who you are*) make the list only because of their prior reputation in physics and have only small quantum programs (and in my book there are also some glaring obmissions.) But anyway, interesting, that at least the U.S News and World Report thinks “Quantum” is a valid subdiscipline. Now let’s just hope this means that we don’t become old and crusty.
My conspiracy theory is that they probably adjust the criteria to get “the right answers”, in the sense of “How is it possible that isn’t in the top N ranks? We must have made a mistake in the rankings!”
Mm, WordPress clobbered my comment. The last bit should read ““How is it possible that [insert name of famous premier institution] isn’t in the top N ranks? We must have made a mistake in the rankings!—
Okay, without stepping in the political minefield of which you’d delete, what ten (well, seven, since they have thirteen in their top ten) schools would you *add* to make a top twenty?
USN&WD’s rankings are, except where noted, intended to be U.S.-centric. Nothing wrong with that, if you’re an American looking for a grad school and aren’t planning on going abroad. Going abroad is a big step, for a lot of reasons, and something Americans do far less often than we should.
But, let’s go international. Would all seven of your picks be outside the U.S.? To me, the top two missing are Oxford and Todai (U. Tokyo), but it does seem easy to name another dozen…
Oh sure Rod, TRY to get me in trouble!
What exactly does “Quantum” mean? Does it mean Quantum Computing?
I mean, most areas of physics use quantum mechanics pretty heavily.
I suspect it means quantum information science. Whether or not it contains quantum optics or not (which is normally under AMO) is an interesting question. I extrapolate this mostly from who they listed, but if they have a broader definition this might explain a few “abnormalties.”
But you are right lots of other parts of physics use (or misuse!) quantum theory.
From context, it looks like “quantum” means “quantum physics”, just like “nuclear” means “nuclear physics” and “plasma” means “plasma physics”.
If I recall correctly from time wasted on the high school debate team, the correct title is “Useless Snooze and World Distort”.