Nobel winner urges change

By Bayard Stern Special to the Florida State Times

Can education in the sciences keep up with science itself?

"Not unless it changes," says Dr. Robert Schrieffer, chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

A Nobel Prize winner, Schrieffer believes the traditional rigid division of study into disciplines - chemistry, biology, physics - may need revision.

"A central issue is whether discipline-based education, which has produced such a cornucopia of excellent science over the past half century, is well suited to address the most challenging and relevant problems at the forefront of science and technology today," Schreiffer says.

"Scientific research is evolving," he says, "from a collection of separate disciplines with their own languages and conventions to an effort that must be cooperative."

In the field of turbulence, for example, physicists, mathematicians, aerodynamicists, hydrodynamicists and computer scientists have made great contributions by working together.

In the past, such specialized disciplines have been largely segregated.

"But science is becoming cross disciplined, and graduate education must follow," Schrieffer argues. "Many forefront research projects involve a variety of fields," Schrieffer says. "Yet most graduate courses are tied closely to a traditional discipline, even a specialized subdiscipline."

Research across disciplines, though necessary, raises problems as long as graduate education is over-specialized. "When chemists speak with physicists, by and large, they have sufficiently different backgrounds and different points of view ..." Schrieffer says. "It is quite remarkable I think to one who is not in the field to see how high these barriers are... The barriers must be crossed in graduate school."

One scheme might look something like this: Several "lead" professors decide on a set of sub-disciplines that complement each other.

"A natural combination of courses for cross-disciplinary study," says Schreiffer, "may be solid-state chemistry combined with materials science and physics.

"The lead professors should gain an in-depth familiarity with the relevant concepts, reasoning, and results with all areas involved."

Each professor would then pick out four or five key topics where those fields intersect. All would then teach courses in a sequence emphasizing their own disciplines, but maintaining continuity with other courses in the sequence.

Under such an arrangement, students could appreciate the way different disciplines relate to each other and be better prepared for advanced research.

"Such a change", he says, "will take a lot of work and thought, and will encounter obstacles from a system that has rewarded specialization."

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