New Physics

The chain-reaction revolution in high school physics set off by M.I.T.'s Physical Science Study Committee (TIME, July 29, 1957, et seq.) will touch 12,000 students this fall. Latest link in the reaction: five summer institutes that last week graduated 300 teachers familiar with the M.I.T. committee's radically new theories of physics teaching and able to handle a wide repertoire of new experiments. During the eight-week courses sponsored this summer by the National Science Foundation, the high school teachers suggested changes in the M.I.T. text, enthusiastically accepted the basic idea: lead students to discover physics concepts through experiments, rather than use experiments to verify laws already memorized. Other M.I.T. innovations: increased emphasis on theoretical rather than applied physics; less electrical circuitry, greater stress on atomics; early teaching of the principle of wave action, to give a unifying theme to much of what will follow.

The 300 newly retrained teachers will probably be the last real pioneers of the new physics course; they will face their classes with lab books still only half written, texts still partly mimeographed, experiments still to be polished or replaced by completely new demonstrations (the University of Minnesota's summer institute came up with two methods of studying wave motion, one with a Land camera and stroboscopic light, the other with magnetic tape). By fall of 1959, when the M.I.T. committee and the National Science Foundation hope to have trained 750 more teachers, the revolution in physics teaching will be accepted matter-of-factly by some 50,000 high school students. But the chain-reaction's shock wave will continue spreading. Chief shock absorbers: the nation's colleges, many of which teach a brand of physics as outmoded as the one now being replaced in the high schools.

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