Do you know much about physics? I mean, you're the President of the United States: a country

with five thousand nuclear weapons, birthplace of the world's computing and telecommunications

industry, home of the first atomic clock and creator of the global positioning system.

But chances are, if you just took regular American high school physics, you don't know

one iota about the science behind these things (No offense). That's because high school physics

students across most of America are not required to learn about pretty much any physical phenomena

discovered or explained more recently than 1865. Yes, 1865. That's the year the civil

war ended and well over a decade before Albert Einstein was even born!

You know what can happen in 150 years, Mr. President? A lot. Velcro, for one. But let

me list some useful and important ideas of the last 150 years of physics that aren't

a required part of most standard US high school physics courses:

Photons. The structure of atoms. The existence of Antimatter. GPS. Lasers. Transistors. Diodes

and LEDs. Quarks. Chaos Theory. Electron Microscopy. MRI scanning. The Big Bang. Black Holes. Star

formation. The fact that gravity bends light. The fact that the universe is expanding. The

Higgs Boson and the weak and strong nuclear forces and all the rest of quantum mechanics

and relativity and the topic of every single Nobel Prize in Physics since… always. Basically,

most of the important stuff.

I mean, Mr. President, imagine if history classes didn't talk about the abolition of

slavery, world wars I or II, the great depression, the rise of the US as a global superpower,

the cold war or the civil rights movement or heaven forbid the first African American

President. Or imagine if biology classes didn't talk about DNA, or hormones, or cell reproduction

or the modern germ theory of disease or ecology. Or if geologists didn't talk about plate tectonics.

And computer scientists… well… in 1865 a computer was a person who computed your

taxes.

Now, if you were lucky enough to have an ambitious teacher or take Advanced Placement Physics,

then you might have learned about some of Einstein's discoveries of 1905! Yes! Current

events! But learning about how Einstein's work helped set the stage for a century of

amazing developments in our understanding of the universe is not a part of the standard

curriculum.

So why, Mr. President, am I addressing this letter to you? Well, you appoint the Secretary

of Education, for one - and I do believe that high school physics is somewhat related to

education.

Now, maybe your education secretary says, "ancient physics is already hard to teach

to high schoolers. And you want us to teach them modern physics which is even harder?!

Students can't really appreciate the beauty of modern physics without fancy college level

mathematics." RUBBISH. Ever heard of Carl Sagan? Richard Feynman? Or Neil deGrasse Tyson?

These great men have been 100% committed to the appreciation and dissemination of the

awesomeness of the universe. And we should be too. How else are we supposed to foster

and find our future brilliant innovators, inventors, and explorers? How can we expect

to educate our citizens for the next century if we don't teach about the last?

And that's not to say that we should ignore math, either - on the contrary, math is one

of the most beautiful and awesome things in the universe, especially because it allows

us to understand the universe.

In particular, the last 150 years have borne fruit to perhaps the most drastic changes

in our understanding of the universe, ever, and these new ways of thinking and solving

problems should be the centerpiece of an education in physics.

Between you and me, Mr. President, I think we'd better start making physics education

more awesome here in the US, otherwise the next Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman will come

from somewhere with more educational foresight - maybe even, the Internet.

Sincerely,

A collection of atoms known as Henry

ps you're probably super busy, but if you'd like to hear about physics education across

the Atlantic, I highly recommend heading over to Brady's channel, Sixty Symbols, for a perspective

from the UK. I bet you'll enjoy it.