Brian Greene

This is easily the worst course I've ever taken in my 19 well-suffered years of life. There are honestly too many bad things about this course to enumerate so I will just focus my disappointment on Professor Brian Randolph Greene. When I was a little schoolboy, while my classmates pined to be firefighters or police officers or lawyers or quantitative finance senior directors, I sat inside wondering about the stars. I especially loved Professor Greene's NOVA Documentaries, often falling asleep to that husky transatlantic voice of his. But meeting him in person, I wonder how I could have ever been so foolish. First, like all "great" "science popularizers," "Professor" Greene prioritizes spectacle over substance in his crowded lectures. Ditching the trusty chalkboard and eraser, he crafts engaging slides that ambitiously promise to teach us "advanced" concepts in "modern physics," like special relativity and quantum mechanics (never mind that these two subjects are now nearing a century of their original conception). Worse, they inherit all the worst pitfalls of "Hollywood science," like the ridiculous "curved sheet analogy" of general relativity (which cannot even be called analogy, since it requires gravity to explain gravity, lol), and the anachronistic "relativistic mass" framing of special relativity. But honestly I can excuse wrong physics - I draw the line at general arrog…

This course represents everything wrong with education at this university. Its haphazard and cramped construction encourages students to skim and read summaries of the "great texts" on the syllabus, showing up to class hungover and high, and raising their hands every now and then to spurt unqualified musings on the meanings of "love," "justice," and "honor." Worse, this intellectual decay is actively upheld by the teachers of this course, who (as a general rule) prioritize the foolish and dangerous exaltation of the "great works of Western literature" (just think about the ridiculous name of this course). Does anyone seriously think that the works of Homer, Vergil, and friends deserve more attention than those of Morrison, Baldwin, and Mary Shelley? In these times, it is far more important to question the basis for which the Western tradition of storytelling has produced so called "masterpieces." It's important to realize that good literature derives its value from... well, it being a compelling story, rather than being cemented within an established tradition or any of that nonsense.

Professor Greene uses his new website (now public!) to teach the class for him. There is a weekly 2 hour session where he reviews the online lessons, which are comprised of “modules, and then the class goes over some harder problem with Brian’s guidance. The modules take somewhere between 1 and 2 hours each and usually 4-5 are assigned a week (there are 44 total). The 2nd to last week of class, we go over things beyond the online course, which is cool, and the final week of class is the final (its not during finals week) but Prof. Greene left this up to a vote and we voted for a week early. The online material is slow and at times tedious and boring, but the problems work for helping you to understand. The final grade is based mostly on your performance on the final exam. I got a lot of the online material wrong, but did well on the final so I did well in the class. After each online problem is an explanation of how to do it which is quite useful. I did not find either the online class or the session especially wonderful but somehow I learned the material (and I certainly did not study anything extra). A few things: It is cool to have a famous professor as your teacher. Brian Greene will NOT know your name if you take this class. Sorry. That being said, he is a hilarious dude, listen to him in the sessions, he is funny when he makes side comments. Watch all the videos on doubl…

So, G4022 is meant to be a class for physics majors. Instead, this class is a hybrid mesh of pure mathematics, physics and, albeit interesting, but not particularly useful for a physics majors, philosophy. Compared to how the physics department used to teach this course, this year's class had many holes in it, some of which were patched up in homeworks. Leaving the class to teach themselves half the material always poses risks that a student will not absorb the essentials of qm. With the time remaining towards the end of the course, rather than cover topics the physics department typically teaches, such as the WKB approximation, the variational principle, along with other side topics that improve one's ability to perform calculations, the time was used to lecture about topics that were philosophical in nature. Among the topics were the measurement problem and many worlds philosophy, which, though interesting in their own way, are not helpful in teaching how to actually utilize qm. Prof. Greene is rather charismatic, but this allows his ego to expand. To end this, physics majors be warned: You will have a major hole in your quantum basics, so be sure to read books and ask questions, but perhaps not ask Prof. Greene... you may just receive a "PBS Special" type of answer.

I learned quite a lot in this course, as much factually about certain physical phenomena and concepts like General Relativity as I did about a general philosophy towards life, and an appreciation for the ways in which a humanist and scientific perspective can unite. 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2021 Course: PHYSUN1111_001_2021_3-ORIGINSANDMEANING : PHYSUN1111_001_2021_3 - ORIGINS AND MEANING Instructor: Brian Greene

You will pass this class, assuming you know your PEMDAS. But it will not be easy on your soul, especially if you are a STEM major. I will briefly note that the fourth unit of Frosci (on climate change) is actually quite good, and David Helfand is a wonderful person who brings light and joy.

Many of my friends did not read a single page all year and still ended with an A, but the workload will vary greatly from class-to-class. But you're at Columbia, right? You came here to study.

This review is for Greene's Special Relativity class, which is a relatively (no pun intended) new mode of teaching that Professor Greene was intimately involved in creating. It involved a lot of online learning, which is very different than what I was expecting when I signed up for the course. Nevertheless, I did learn a good deal from the experience. To preface this review, let me first say that Professor Greene knows exactly what he's talking about. He knows the physics behind every problem, he has an incredibly intuitive grasp of the material, he gets special relativity. That being said, he's not an impressive professor because there is a significant disconnect between the student and the professor in this course. We weren't really being taught by him; rather, we were being taught by video lectures and things that he happened to be the face of. And we did have the luxury of having a two hour discussion-style section with him every week, but sometimes this time wasn't used well, and many times, it was just arduous to sit through him have back-and-forths with one or two students for an hour and a half. In addition, the communication between Professor Greene and his students was atrocious. About half the class thought the final was a full week before it actually was. Nobody knew how he was grading. It was quite subjective - although, to be fair, he said that he "adjusted the p…

This professor deserves an unbiased culpa review that doesn't mention his fame. Brian Greene is, in short, an incredible Professor, likely the greatest, most fun to listen to, enthusiastic professor I've ever had. He made quantum mechanics seem so easy, so crystal clear, that I felt as if I were taking high school level quantum. Lectures were fun and engaging, questions were encouraged and always answered without judgment. This led to some awkward moments when obvious or annoying questions were answered with as much detail as interesting questions, but made me feel eager not only to ask questions during class, but after class as well. As a note, this was a very tough semester for me as I had to deal with a personal loss, and when I emailed Professor Greene, he said that not only would I be allowed to hand in the next homework whenever I needed to, but he would personally tutor me on any lecture I missed, which I held him to. The material itself was fairly basic quantum; no different than what is learned in the end of PHYS 2601, with more mathematical detail, and I'm pretty eager to figure out where he will take this course when more complex topics arise. It made me feel almost nervous that I wasn't learning enough physics. At other schools people complain that quantum is like the physics major organic chemistry, the sail-or-fail this-will-determine-whether-you-major-in-physics…

About 4-6 hours a week for the online material. Make sure you have done the most recent modules before you go to class, otherwise class doesn’t help. He also dislikes absentees. So go to class. If you ace the final, he curves it. It will be your grade. If you do better on the midterm, he weighs the midterm, online material and final to get your grade. How exactly he weighs things he doesn’t say. (Most people I think get As)