Lincoln Wolfenstein is Emeritus University Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University. His research has dealt with elementary particle phenomenology, and more recently, with neutrino physics. Professor Wolfenstein received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1948, and taught at Carnegie Mellon for 52 years, 1948-2000. |
Chapter 2, selection: The Scientist and the
University What are the goals of the university? That is the first
question one must answer. I believe the goals are (1) to transmit the
knowledge and culture of mankind from one generation to another; and (2)
to create new knowledge and new culture. These goals are not transient,
following the latest fad but rather reflect fundamental values of mankind.
There is an unfortunate tendency in universities to set up new committees
to establish new programs, to find strategic advantages, to reinvent the
university. This, of course, is in part a reflection of contemporary American
society, built around advertisements always pushing something wonderfully
new. In my own field of science, physics, I feel strongly
the sense of continuity. The fundamental laws of motion and the law of
gravity established by Newton still govern the motion of the planets and
mans voyage to the moon. Science writers, and even some philosophers
of science, love to herald revolutionary new developments that overthrow
all our old ideas. But they do not understand. For example, Einsteins
general theory of relativity is a more accurate theory of gravity, but
it does not overthrow Newtons theory, it encompasses it. The relation
of a new theory to an older well-established one can be described by a
correspondence principle, a term invented by Niels Bohr to
describe the relation of classical mechanics to quantum mechanics. The
new theory reduces to the old in a suitable limit. I like to think of
this in poetic terms (thanks to Edwin Markham): He drew a circle that shut me out-- Continuity does not mean that we should not bring our courses up to date. In physics there has been the tradition that the first-year college course covers the foundations: classical mechanics, thermodynamics, and electrodynamics, and so hardly mentions any twentieth-century physics. I have long protested against this and even gave a special freshman course to remedy this. On the other hand, I worry about the other extreme in many humanities areas, where new courses are often invented to satisfy the latest fad. |
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Last updated 01 November 2004.