"Simple enough for a beginner" indeed

[steuard]

Browsing a local bookstore, I spotted Supersymmetry DeMYSTiFied. The "DeMYSTiFied" series seems to have a style similar to the "For Dummies" books but with more of a "study guide" flavor (they all include "end-of-chapter quizzes and a final exam [to] help reinforce learning"). I guessed the book must be intended for a broad audience excited about cutting edge physics.

So when I randomly flipped it open, I was surprised to find myself in a chapter called "A Crash Course in Weyl Spinors" on a page full of equations. Flipping around some more, the book seems at least as equation-heavy as the average textbook, but presented in that "For Dummies" style. The same cognitive dissonance appears in the ad copy:

It's a no-brainer! You'll get:

• An explanation of the Wess-Zumino model
• Tips on how to build supersymmetric lagrangians
• [etc.]

I'm really wondering about the intended audience for this book. It clearly assumes that the reader is comfortable doing sophisticated calculations in quantum field theory (often a 2nd year graduate course), and it's teaching techniques that you'd only need if you're going to read (and write) primary literature in particle physics. But the "golly gee let's make this fun and simple" style seems like the last thing that would inspire confidence in an ambitious physics grad student, particularly when it's competing with well-regarded textbooks written by masters in the field.

A final bizarre note: At the moment, Amazon ranks this book #36 in the category "Science for Kids". Hey, folks with kids: order this and let me know how it works out for ya!

Comments

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Oh, blast: yes, that's the link that I never hit "paste" to include. (Hey, look, it's still in my copy buffer!) Oops.

I knew that they'd started using QED in frosh quantum (now that there is frosh quantum: back in the day the standard sequence didn't do any quantum until fourth semester... but I was a frosh in 1998-99). On the other hand, I wasn't sure how much of it they actually covered (or how recently that had started).

I'm a serious fan of Townsend's approach to Big Quantum. I'm worried that his text may be at a bit too high a level for my current students, but I've got almost a year to decide. In any event, I don't know of any text that does what I want it to at a lower level, so I may still use Townsend and just flesh it out with a bunch of my own explanations along the way.

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

When I was TAing a grad-level Quantum for Chemists course in grad school with a horrid professor and a mediocre book, Townsend's approach greatly influenced the extra notes I handed out to the students (which got very favorable reviews).

Thanks to Donnelly's approach to teaching Big Quantum, that was the first textbook I ever got really incredibly familiar with. I haven't touched it in almost ten years, but I once knew it like the back of my hand and loved it. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.

Newt

[steuard.livejournal.com]

What was Donnelly's approach? I'm scheduled to teach the class next year, and I'm tempted to try something a little different.

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

It was much more teacher-intensive, in some ways, but also demanded a lot of the students, which I think was the secret to its success (at least for me). Class met, I think, once a week. Homework was assigned on material that had not yet been covered in class, and was graded purely on completion, not on correctness of answers. Each week, one student (or maybe a pair of students? details are getting fuzzy with time) would present on the topic of the homework that was due that week. Donnelly was available to us basically any time you could reasonably expect to find a significant percentage of the professors on campus -- he had generous office hours, but we also knew where his lab was, and generally, if he wasn't in his office, we could find him in his lab, where he always gave every evidence of being absolutely delighted to drop what he was doing and discuss that week's homework topic. The result was that we would read the relevant portion of Townsend's book (and re-read, and puzzle over it, and re-read it again), spend some number of hours discussing the material with Donnelly (I think this part only worked because it was a small class, and because we had a tendency to show up two or three at a time), wrestle with the homework (which I got right more often than homework for other classes; this approach really worked for me, although Chris (an auditory learner) was a bit less enthusiastic about it), and show up for class to listen to a presentation by classmates that cemented the new knowledge in our minds.

I don't think I could have handled having all my Mudd classes work this way; it took a lot of time on my part, as well as on Donnelly's part. But I really enjoyed it, and by the end of the course, I knew the material really well (and knew the book really well, such that for a considerable time afterwards, I could easily refer back to it for anything I forgot, and I was so familiar with what it all meant that a quick reread would bring it all back to mind -- sort of like re-reading a very familiar novel, where one paragraph triggers the whole chapter in your mind).

Huh. Maybe it's time for a re-read now; I'm getting all nostalgic for quantum mechanics, talking about all this. :)

Newt

[(Anonymous)]

A couple of corrections:
6 students presented. Classes were capped at 12, so you presented approximately biweekly. (1 or 2 students were responsible for providing refreshments for the break, which was quite necessary in this 7pm-10pm class.) Since there were rarely exactly 12 students in a section, Donnelly would work himself into the rotation.

The presentations were on entire sections of the book. You could present homework problems if they were sufficiently interesting, but the idea was really to highlight the key ideas and you were given wide latitude in determine what they were and how to present them. I still remember "Build that wave function!", my presentation on the hydrogen atom. You had to provide feedback for all presenters; ground rules were given, and Donnelly reviewed the feedback prior to handing it over to the presenter to make sure these were actually followed. (I.e., providing constructive criticism, no ad-hominen, etc.)

This is technique is called "seminar-style" course, and is an import from Swarthmore. I call it "Moore method for physicists"; its feel was quite similar to Prof. Su's topology class, which was another favorite.

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, I do remember several students presenting each time. I don't remember refreshments, or it being an evening course; those may have been later modifications (I took it during Donnelly's first year at Mudd), but they sound like good ones.

Newt