Letter from Boston

Practical Physics

By MASAKO YAMADA

I thought I'd finished taking all of my required courses a long time ago, and this made me happy, since I could pursue my doctoral research full-time. However, when I reviewed my course record at the end of last semester, I realized that I'd forgotten to take a few electives. I'd still be needing to take a course or two in order to get my degree.

I quickly looked at my options and realized that most of the courses did not look very attractive. The Boston University physics department is too small to be able to offer lots of advanced electives every semester. Sometimes students have to wait years before certain desired courses are offered.

It's not as if perfectly adequate courses in highly respectable fields are not being taught every semester. There are always interesting new things to learn. However, I'm a fourth-year graduate student with a clear research topic. I want to take courses that will enhance my research, not take precious time away from it. I think most of my peers feel the same.

The one course I wanted to take, biophysics, is not being offered until next year, so I decided to take a course in polymer physics instead. Polymer physics is basically an extension of the field called statistical mechanics, which is my area of research.

As a matter of fact, my lab is officially called the Center for Polymer Studies (although the focus of the lab has shifted since it was named), so I figured I was bound to learn something useful. Besides, the professor of the course, Rama Bansil, has taught biophysics in the past. I knew there would be considerable overlap in the curriculum.

The polymer physics class is an advanced elective but it has an enrollment of about 10 people, which is pretty good. However, this figure is somewhat deceiving since many of the students show up only sporadically. Rama understands the mentality of the advanced students. She says it's not too surprising that they don't want to come to class.

I really get the sense that she wants us to get practical skills from the course. For instance, she encourages students to work together on their homework, since collaboration is a crucial part of research. She even thinks it's fine for students to try to find existing solutions to homework problems, since one of the first steps of doing research is finding out whether anybody else has already solved the problem (this can often take more time than solving the problem directly). Of course, she requires us to cite ideas we've gotten from other people or from existing texts, as in the research world.

The workload has not been too heavy during the semester. However, Rama has assigned a final project that will determine a good part of our grade. We will have to present a 15-minute talk to the class and then hand in a research paper.

We can choose any topic related to polymers, which is pretty easy, considering that many everyday materials are made of polymers. People often think of synthetic plastics or rubbers when they think of polymers, but in fact, many all-natural substances — like wood, gelatin or potato starch — are polymers as well.

I've decided to do a project on the physical properties of bread. This is not related to my research, but it is certainly related to my personal interest in food. The experiments are embarrassingly simple.

Basically, they consist of mixing flour and water, and poking, prodding, and stretching the dough under different conditions. I have consulted a list of experiments designed for kids in order to construct my experiments. I plan on bringing some of the dough to class to demonstrate its properties.

This sounds like an elementary school science fair project, but Rama herself has brought plumber's cement, clay, rubber bands and liquid silicon to class to show us how they behave.

I've also decided to do a very simple simulation to try to capture the essential features of the dough. On their own the experiments are in fact very respectable. However, I can't help thinking that I need to show a couple of computer-generated graphs to prove that I've done "real" scientific work. Perhaps this is another lesson about the research world that I've learned in this class.

Shukan ST: Dec. 17, 1999

(C) All rights reserved