Bait and Switch, and observation from Entropy Bound. Peter’s argument is in the context of “the lab” being more mysterious when you don’t know what’s going on (the bait) but by the time you get to work in one you’re doing actual science which is (one hopes) quite interesting, even if the apparati have lost their mystique.

But when you get down to it, it’s a bait-and-switch: when you are growing up, no-one ever tells you that things aren’t so colorful and mysterious, so by the time you finally realize that it’s not, you’ve found a much more interesting — albeit prosaic –real world to ponder.

I can certainly identify with this, and also see a related effect along another tangent: are we using the right bait? You take physics classes (and this probably holds true for other disciplines, though I have little empirical data for comparison) and there is this sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken promise of “I know this is basic stuff and may seem boring, but I promise if you learn this, we’ll get to some interesting stuff later on.” Whether that holds true or not depends on what you’re doing, who’s teaching and what your threshold of “interesting” is. I now wonder if this is part of the hurdle to get more students interested in physics — do we bore them to death learning basic kinematics, thermodynamics and E&M? Does this drive some students away who might otherwise be interested if they were doing physics discovered after 1900? At least in biology there is the prospect of dissecting something even in introductory courses (which is why I shied away from biology. Dissection, moi? Not only no, but fuck no). In chemistry you play with chemicals. In physics we’re sliding blocks down an incline. (My undergraduate experience did have one bonus, though. Since we were a small school and could only support one sequence per year in general physics, it was designated a sophomore-level course, so that everyone taking it could have calculus as a pre- or co-requisite. In order to make sure they physics majors had something to do, we had a course in basic optics and relativity and another in electronics that were engaging, but then anyone following the normal sequence regressed to the yawn-fest)

Interesting stuff does come later, though it’s still slow in coming. When I TA’d the modern physics lab in grad school (and from what I recall as an undergraduate) the students were much more enthusiastic about it, and in grad school it was the largely the same basic bunch of students that had taken the calculus-based physics sequence — many were pre-engineering (we had a big engineering department, and the physics prerequisites paid for a lot of TAs). Electron and x-ray diffraction, basic atomic spectroscopy, nuclear decay. Even though it’s less hands-on, it’s more interesting. But still lacking something, because the apparatus you use is often a single-purpose, pre-packaged, plug-and-play experiment, and not something you can tinker with. The promise of getting to play with more and better toys was “later on.” But not immediately, since quantum mechanics and electrodynamics didn’t have a lab segment to them. The closest I got as an undergrad was my senior project; even though it was a fairly simple experiment with polarized light, I got to cobble stuff together from the lab equipment. Two other student projects I recall were a Schlieren optics setup and a measurement of a variable star. Actual hands-on experimentation, but it was three years before the opportunity arose.

I know that there has been discussion of how to re-vamp the physics labs going on elsewhere in physics-blog-land at Physics and physicists, with a followup from Uncertain Principles, which contains some good material for further reading.