Internetics and Physics I
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.