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February 24, 2017
Responsibility
Many years ago, when I was an assistant professor at Princeton, there was a cocktail party at Curt Callan’s house to mark the beginning of the semester. There, I found myself in the kitchen, chatting with Sacha Polyakov. I asked him what he was going to be teaching that semester, and he replied that he was very nervous because — for the first time in his life — he would be teaching an undergraduate course. After my initial surprise that he had gotten this far in life without ever having taught an undergraduate course, I asked which course it was. He said it was the advanced undergraduate Mechanics course (chaos, etc.) and we agreed that would be a fun subject to teach. We chatted some more, and then he said that, on reflection, he probably shouldn’t be quite so worried. After all, it wasn’t as if he was going to teach Quantum Field Theory, “That’s a subject I’d feel responsible for.”
This remark stuck with me, but it never seemed quite so poignant until this semester, when I find myself teaching the undergraduate particle physics course.