Fascinating physics, you've got me on the go

TO THOSE who yawned their way through school physics lessons, news of the collapse in the numbers of pupils taking the subject will come as little surprise. A study by Buckingham University has revealed a 38 per cent fall in A-level student numbers since 1990. At the same time, the proportion of new science teachers qualified in physics has plunged by 50 per cent.

These two statistics are not unrelated. Yet even those teachers who are qualified face a huge challenge in persuading pupils to stay the course.

Physics has a fearsome reputation as the hardest of the hard sciences, with all too many ties with that other widely loathed subject, mathematics. And as a physicist and parent of teenage children, I could weep over the way my subject is taught. Looking through their textbooks, I see it presented as a soulless collection of facts, with clumsy attempts at "relevancy" and no hint of its truly cosmic reach.

For me, the fascination of physics lies in its power to reveal connections between the cosmic and the quotidian.

The same law that explains why iceskaters spin faster as they pull in their arms explains why gravity pulling together interstellar dust led to the formation of the spinning planet we call Earth. Ice floats on frozen ponds because of the electronic bonds between water molecules - whose strength is dictated by subatomic processes now driving the expansion of the universe.

Or to take an even more everyday example, my own research has uncovered a connection between the cosmos and the way toast so often lands butter-side down. As it slides off a plate, toast starts to spin, but this spin-rate isn't very high - so the toast typically flips over. It turns out that this spin-rate depends on physical constants fixed during the Big Bang itself. In other words, toast lands butter-side down because our universe is designed that way.

Many physicists harrumph about the need to teach the foundations of the subject before getting on to all the glamorous stuff about black holes, quantum physics and the Big Bang.

Yet they forget that they were often motivated by childhood fascination with such esoterica, becoming physicists despite the boring lessons, not because of them.

Much of what is now routinely taught in schools once baffled the greatest minds in science. Barely a century ago, physicists argued bitterly over the existence of atoms. Yet woe betide any pupil that fails to accept what is being taught without a murmur.

We should fear the resulting decline of physics in schools. Put bluntly, it is not arts graduates who will solve global challenges like climate change and energy demand: it is physicists.

Without them, we all face a very bleak future indeed.

* Robert Matthews is a physicist at Aston University, Birmingham, and author of 25 Big Ideas: Science that is Changing our World (Oneworld, Pounds 9.99).

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