Basic HTML version of Foils prepared Jan 17 1999

Foil 8 Internetics and Physics I

From Physics and Engineering Educational Initiative Project Review at NPAC -- Jan 18 1999. by Geoffrey C. Fox
Physics is declining in popularity as a major even though
  • Physics research is flourishing
  • Science (and Engineering) are critical to Society (Information technology is built on micro devices and communications infrastructure)
Physics is in many ways a BETTER educational background than computer science to today's major computer science challenge -- designing and building distributed systems
  • We can quite easily train people to program in Java but it is not so easy to design what should be programmed and how it fits together
  • Physics trains students to look at systems from a fundamental point of view and to analyze quantitatively (See Feynman's role in Challenger disaster)
  • All senior people in NPAC have a science or engineering Ph.D.

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