Students should check the 8.059 Home Page regularly for updates and announcements. Students can also send comments to the teaching staff anonymously, using the form provided on the web page. Please be constructive!
All these texts, and others which may be of value are available in the Physics Reading Room. Some monographs and graduate textbooks may also be useful for certain topics. Here are some suggestions:
Problem sets are a very important part of 8.059. We believe that sitting down yourself and trying to reason your way through a problem not only helps you learn the material deeply, but also develops analytical tools fundamental to a successful career in science. We recognize that students also learn a great deal from talking to and working with each other. We therefore encourage each 8.059 student to make his/her own attempt on every problem and then, having done so, to discuss the problems with one another and collaborate on understanding them more fully. The solutions you submit must reflect your own work. They must not be transcriptions or reproductions of other people's work. Plagiarism is a serious offense and is easy to recognize. Don't submit work which is not your own
The midterm is scheduled for Wednesday evening, March 20, 7:30--9:30 pm.
The faculty may alter grades to reflect class
participation, improvement, effort and other qualitative measures of
performance.
Everyone in 8.059 will be expected to research, write and "publish" a short paper on a topic related to the content of 8.05 or 8.059. The paper can explain a physical effect or further explicate ideas or problems covered in the courses.
The aim is to give you experience in writing a scientific report aimed at your own peers. The paper is not expected to involve original research (though it's not out of the question!). Instead it may be based on your calculations and/or reading and library research. The paper should be written in the style and format of a brief journal article and should aim at an audience of 8.059 students.
Writing, editing, revising and "publishing" skills are an integral part of the project. Each of you will ask another student to edit your draft and will then prepare a final draft on the basis of the suggestions of your "peer editor". We will supply templates for the Revtex version of LaTeX (used by the Physical Review) so that you can prepare your paper in a finished, publishable, form. We strongly encourage you to use LaTeX.
You will be asked to submit your first draft marked up with the editorial comments of your peer editor. This first draft will then be critiqued by a "writing assistant" (see below) and returned to you. Two weeks after the first draft is due, you will submit your final draft. Your papers will be graded on the intellectual quality of your work, the effectiveness of your presentation and the success of your prose style. A part of your grade will also be determined by how carefully and constructively you have edited the draft of the paper for which you were the peer editor. The grade you earn for your paper will count 20% towards your final grade in 8.059. A grade of B- or better on your 8.059 paper will satisfy Phase II of the MIT Writing Requirement.
When a practicing physicist writes a research paper, he or she often asks a few colleagues to comment on a first draft. The final draft is then reviewed anonymously by one or several peers before it is accepted by a journal like the Physical Review. The goal of this informal and formal peer review process is to push authors to write papers which successfully communicate ideas among a community of peers. Your goal is to write a paper which presents a phenomenon or problem in quantum physics in a way which communicates your ideas clearly and effectively to your fellow 8.059 students, namely to your peers. Do not seek to teach Profs. Jaffe and Fisher, although they are always happy to learn. Do seek to teach your peers. If your peers cannot understand what you write, you have not succeeded. Note that writing for your peers is a much higher standard than writing for the faculty. Presenting a topic sufficiently clearly and logically that one of your peers new to this topic can learn about it requires clarity of thought and depth of understanding. These are the prerequisites for an effective written (or, for that matter, verbal) presentation.
Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of the Writing Program, we have obtained resources to support several "writing assistants" who can help you with writing, editing and preparing the paper. Each of you will be contacted by email by one of the writing assistants on April 10. (See the schedule below.) You should arrange to meet soon thereafter, and should seek their assistance from then on as you need it. They will critique the proposal and outline for your paper, and will also critique the first draft which you submit after it has been peer edited. In between, you may also ask them to help you with parts of your paper as you write them. Think of your writing assistant as a coach. They are there to help you, and are good at it. If you wish to get their help earlier than April 10, please submit your paper proposal and the name of your peer editor earlier, and one of the writing assistants will be assigned to help you.
By the time you turn in your final paper, it will have been edited by one of your peers and you will also have had time to implement the suggestions of one of the writing assistants. Past 8.059 students have found that their papers improve enormously through this process. Based on experience from previous years, by the time you turn in your finished paper, very many of you will have produced an account of a piece of physics written to a very high standard. It would be a shame if these papers were not ``published''. We shall have as our goal the ``publication'' of a journal consisting of all your papers. There are two important caveats: (i) only papers which are submitted electronically, using the LaTeX template provided, will be published; (ii) only papers which earn a grade of B or higher will be published. Subject to these caveats, we hope to produce a compilation of all of your papers. We will circulate this "journal" to all of you, so that you can in the end read the work of all your peers, and not just of the one person whose work you edited.
More details on what we expect in an 8.059 paper, a list of suggested topics, and the LaTeX templates will all be provided in a few weeks.
You should use the first part of the term to consider possible topics and to choose a peer editor. Your peer editor must be an 8.059 student, and must be someone whose own 8.059 paper topic is unrelated to yours. A list of suggested topics will be provided in a few weeks, but you will be free to choose topics not on this list upon first obtaining Prof. Jaffe's approval. By the time Spring Break is upon us, you should have a good idea of what you are going to write about and should be well into the process of reading about your topic and doing the calculations, if any are involved.
This must consist of: a title, a one paragraph description of what you plan to write about, an outline of your proposed paper, a list of several references you plan to use, and the name of your peer editor. You will then be contacted by one of the writing assistants. They may either accept your proposal, or request that you revise it in response to their suggestions. You should arrange to meet with them as soon as possible (even if they accept your proposal). Any of you who have not met with your writing assistant at least once before you submit your first draft will be penalized.
This means that you must give your first draft to your peer editor in sufficient time for that person to critique it substantively by April 24. I would suggest that you each make an appointment with your writing assistant to obtain their comments sometime during the week following April 24. In fact, if A edits for B and B edits for A, I will make sure that A and B have the same writing assistant and would therefore suggest that you both meet him together, to obtain comments on both your papers simultaneously.
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