Faculty Profile
Kannan Jagannathan, Professor of Physics
Kannan ("Jagu") Jagannathan has spent his entire
professional career as an Amherst physics professor, starting in 1981. Along the way, he has chaired the Physics Department, served on many major faculty and administrative committees, chaired the New England
section of the American Physical Society and worked
for six years as assistant editor of the American Journal of Physics. He received a Master of Science degree from the Indian Institutes of Technology in Madras and earned an M.A. at the University of Rochester, where, in 1981, he also received his Ph.D. His research interests include theoretical particle physics, field theory and the foundations of quantum mechanics. We asked him to talk about his approach to teaching, his view of physics and his experiences as a gay professor at Amherst. Here's some of what he told us.
On choosing physics as a career
I grew up in India, in the state of Tamil Nadu. My father was a lawyer and later a judge, and his father also was a lawyer; I considered that an option after high school, but
it was never a very strong interest. I was always more interested in mathematics, and I also had an interest in physics from reading popular books on the subject and biographies of great physicists.
Engineering was what my parents wanted me to go into, and I scored high on a national engineering exam given by the Indian Institutes of Technology, so on a certain day in May 1970, I was to go to Madras for an interview to pick the place of my study in engineering. My father had the tickets?he and I were going to take the train overnight and then do the interview the next day. But that morning the results of another national exam were published: the National Science Talent Search exam, which focused on mathematics and the pure sciences. They were going to offer about 150 spaces; the government was going to pay the students' way through college and through a master's program. I ranked second in the list, meaning that I had not only a scholarship, but also the choice of doing whatever I wanted to do.
So the morning of the day when I would have taken the train and committed myself to engineering, I was able to say, "No, I don't think I want to do that." I chose physics as my major and never looked back.
On teaching
I teach three kinds of audiences, often in separate courses. One is physics majors, who already have a strong motiva tion. Then there are science courses for other science majors or pre-meds, who are often motivated to do the work, but in some cases their motivation arises from their desire to get into medical school. Lastly, there are science courses
directed at students who are not science majors. Those are often limited in mathematical prerequisites, and they often pose the greatest challenge in the classroom: how to convey really deep and sophisticated ideas?exciting ideas?rigorously, without pulling any punches, and at the same time without all the technical machinery that goes with physics.
These general education courses, especially, are ones that I am constantly improving, trying to figure out how to light that spark in students, how to get them to see what I see. There is a sort of a disciplinary value in physics, if you will. When one deals with really sophisticated ideas, one does need to develop a specialized vocabulary to get the full content precisely across, but in physics there is a long tradition that goes back before Einstein and Maxwell, a
tradition of regarding jargon as a burden and trying to minimize it without losing value, without losing the essential idea. We don't want oversimplification, of course. As Einstein said, ?Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.? That's sort of a motto for my approach to general education courses.
The other pedagogical thing about physics is that, unlike mathematics, we are not so committed to a rigorous formulation once and for all. The approach is more like
a conversation: Something is said, and it conveys some
insight, but it raises questions, and the questions modify the formulation. We don't think of it as a closed text, a
finished thing that is delivered. And it's not quite an argument, either?more a refinement, an iterative process that leads to clarity. Rigor is important, but it is not the most fundamental value. Insight is the most fundamental value?insight into the workings of the world.
Correspondingly, the role that texts play in the sciences generally, but in physics particularly, is far less central than the place of texts in the rest of the academy. The world, not merely language, is our text.
On his research
Over the years I've worked on a number of small problems that are a little arcane. I enjoy that. I like toiling in a relatively secluded field, where the problems are interesting to me and maybe to a few other people. These are mathematical questions, physics questions of principle: for example, trying to understand how to contrast different interpretations of quantum mechanics. There's a thing called Bohm's interpretation [which posits a causal explanation for particle behavior], and I'm exploring whether it's radically different from the traditional Copenhagen interpretation [in which particle behavior is fundamentally ambigu ous] or whether it somehow slips in the kinds of incoherence that it alleges of the Copenhagen interpretation. That's a question that has interested me for a number of years.
On being an editor for the American Journal of Physics
I am interested in a broad swath of basic physics. In our department, we expect every professor to be able to teach the entire under graduate curriculum, no matter what his or her specialty might be. We don't hire people just to teach particle physics or nuclear physics or anything separate like that. We think physics is physics. Working on the American Journal of Physics gave me the opportunity to emphasize and further my broad interest and education. There was also a negative aspect to being an
editor, one that I confess I actually enjoyed.
Because of the academic entrepreneurship that has grown at all levels, there is a great deal of pressure on people to publish. And somebody somewhere needs to exercise some kind of restraint on this idea of publishing anything, no matter how ill conceived, half-baked or otherwise not ready. We rejected 80 percent of the articles that were submitted. I felt that was an important role for me to play, and I continue to do that as a referee.
On being a gay faculty member at Amherst
I was probably the second "out" faculty member at Amherst College. When I came here, Dudley Towne, also in physics, had just come out two
or three years earlier. I didn't come out my first year; this was 1981, and I didn't know what to expect. So I waited until my second year. Some time later the floodgates opened, and half the English Department came out.
I worked with a gay and lesbian group in Northampton on the first gay pride march. These days, gay pride parades are ordinary, almost dull, affairs. But this was 1983, and we were really scared. We thought there might be violence and attacks on us, so we had a whole troop of peacekeepers, and we practiced what we would do if confronted with a mob. We walked back to our cars in groups so nobody would be walking alone. This is Northampton we're talking about, not New York City, but it seemed real to us.
Photos: Frank Ward Amherst |
