On physics education at MIT
How the TFUAP’s proposed changes to the GIRs will harm future cohorts of MIT students
To the Editor,
In February, the MIT Task Force on the Undergraduate Academic Program (TFUAP) published a draft proposal with an extensive examination of the current MIT undergraduate curriculum and recommendations on ways to improve student preparedness to tackle the hardest problems in research and industry. Not a month later, Sidarth Erat and 22 others published an open letter in The Tech on many critical aspects of the TFUAP’s proposal. The TFUAP then finalized its report in May. It is not my intention here to address every aspect of the report, nor even all the aspects addressed by the open letter from Erat and coauthors. Rather, I am writing to address one specific and very concerning change to MIT’s General Institute Requirements (GIRs) proposed by the TFUAP, which was highlighted by the open letter — namely, the removal of GIR status from 8.02 (Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism).
The Institute prides itself in providing its students with a wide base of knowledge, enabling them to reason deeply across disciplines and make surprising new connections that advance humankind’s knowledge of mathematics; mastery of the natural sciences; and developments of industry, agriculture, and medicine that can drastically improve quality of life for millions. MIT is a place where curiosity thrives — and in the words of our very own president, Sally Kornbluth, basic science is “curiosity on a mission” — but the table stakes for groundbreaking discovery in any discipline has always been a deep understanding of mathematics and the natural sciences.
To remove 8.02 from the GIRs would be a terrible disservice to future generations of MIT students. Under the TFUAP’s proposal, MIT would require only one physics class for the completion of the GIRs. For those with no incoming physics credit, taking only an updated form of 8.01 (Physics I: Classical Mechanics), including a small amount of electromagnetic physics, would be sufficient. This means only those already with 8.01 credit, or those in degree programs requiring 8.02, would need to enroll in 8.02. Students with incoming 8.01 credit likely attended well-resourced high schools and had the opportunity to take and show mastery in a university-level calculus-based physics course (such as AP Physics C). In terms of physics knowledge, to those who have, more will be given. And should MIT not focus on ensuring that its first-generation or low-income students have the same opportunities to learn such fundamental ideas, rather than force 8.02 to compete with dozens of other courses for students’ attention?
Furthermore, more and more discoveries in this century are being powered by computation across every scale — from massive diffusion models like AlphaFold that help biologists understand how proteins fold, to the most miniscule embedded sensors used to monitor structural health, atmospheric quality, or drug delivery. And beneath the unimaginably deep stack of high-level code, operating systems, instruction sets, logic gates, and transistors is exactly the same electromagnetic physics. To remove 8.02 from the GIRs would remove from MIT’s core curriculum the fundamental (classical) physics underlying all modern computational hardware. Looking ahead into the future, as we expect even more advancement from these technologies, should we not invite our students to intimately understand their basic function?
I would like to close with an anecdote. Educating students broadly across disciplines opens new opportunities for them that they may have never even considered. I am grateful to come from a family that encouraged higher education, but when I left home for MIT, I came from a family of mostly military servicemembers and public servants. Nobody in my family could help me decide what classes to take. In my freshman spring, I enrolled in 8.02 because MIT required it, not because it interested me in particular and not because I had been inspired by any physicist or electrician or electrical engineer family members. And yet, I fell in love with the subject. I remember it fondly as perhaps my favorite course that semester.
The next semester, I took 6.200 (Circuits and Electronics) and I found that I could excel in my aerospace signals processing courses because of what I learned in that class. Later, I would go on to take 6.205 (Digital Systems Laboratory I) and 6.208 (Semiconductor Electronic Circuits). With newfound interests and experiences under my belt, I finished an internship at an electronics startup. And because I felt confident in my signals processing courses, I started pursuing more advanced topics in control theory and computer vision. Now, I’m serving in the U.S. military, helping keep America’s computer networks safe, and I’m even considering a future career in control theory research.
It’s impossible to imagine how different things would be, had I never enrolled in 8.02 four years ago at the behest of MIT’s requirement. Should we not advocate for MIT to educate its students in the fundamentals of every field, even those in which students might not be interested at first?
Signed,
Joseph Hobbs
Joseph Hobbs ’25 is an MIT alumnus who studied Course 16 (Aerospace Engineering) during his time as an undergraduate.