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 \ud83d\ude09 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:<\/p>\n
\n1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
\n2. Harvard University (MA)
\n3. California Institute of Technology
\n4. Stanford University (CA)
\n5. University of California\u2013Berkeley
\n6. University of California\u2013Santa Barbara
\n University of Michigan\u2013Ann Arbor
\n8. Princeton University (NJ)
\n9. Yale University (CT)
\n10. Cornell University (NY)
\n University of Colorado\u2013Boulder
\n University of Illinois\u2013Urbana-Champaign
\n University of Maryland\u2013College Park\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nOkay, 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \ud83d\ude09 But what was interesting to me was … <\/p>\n