In the Physics department at Whitman College, we encourage our students not only to gain knowledge and experience in the field, but to think creatively and forge their own paths in the scientific community. Beginning with your first Physics course your understanding of physical concepts will be challenged through hands-on experimental observation and active classroom discussions. The rigor and breadth of the program will superbly equip any physics major at Whitman with a sound base for graduate work in physics and many fields of engineering. Our students also routinely pursue careers in teaching, technical disciplines ranging from software development to electronics design, and professional careers ranging from medicine to law.

The major program divides logically into introductory and upper levels, providing you with the foundation for advanced thought in physics. Upper-level course work brings significant flexibility. In addition to standard advanced topics in physics such as Electromagnetism, Quantum Mechanics, and Classical Mechanics, we offer topical courses at least every other year: Modern Optics, Biophysics, Computational Physics, and Thermal Physics. We have recently offered special topics courses including Lasers and Semiconductor Physics. We encourage you to pursue independent study courses and explore a topic of special interest to you under the supervision of a Physics faculty member.

Laboratory work in physics is a catalyst to original learning, and the department strives to offer truly integrated courses where there is no clear distinction between the classroom and the laboratory. Your laboratory experiences will illustrate experimental methods while they introduce you to important phenomena. They will challenge you to hone your experimental skills while encouraging you to appreciate the subtle interaction between theory and experiment. Our laboratories are continually being upgraded and renovated – most recently through Howard Hughes Foundation and National Science Foundation grants. Our facilities are well-equipped and accessible, and provide a range of instrumentation from vacuum systems and lasers, to electromagnets, spectrometers and cryogenic apparatus. Our “Introductory Physics” laboratory features student workstations equipped with the latest of PASCO Scientific’s apparatus, all of which is interfaced to PC’S. These computers also have the ability to acquire and analyze motion captured on digital video.

To increase your experience in the lab to complement your coursework or to investigate a topic of particular personal interest, you will be encouraged to pursue an individual research project. Examples of recent projects include an investigation of sonoluminescence, the implementation of a JAVA-based parallel computing scheme with application to quantum statistics, and experiments with single photons.

Your typical senior year coursework will include one or more physics electives per semester, which will allow you to determine which courses best suit your needs. We believe this flexibility is important in allowing you to tailor your coursework to your postgraduate goals. In your senior seminar, you’ll be expected to research a topic of current interest to the physics community and then present the salient points of this research to the rest of the group. The seminar will allow you to familiarize yourself with an area you may be considering for graduate study, as well as provide the opportunity to practice for the oral component of your senior comprehensive examination.

About half of all Whitman’s physics majors pursue graduate programs immediately after earning their degree – approximately another quarter return to graduate studies within a few years of graduation. You may arrange a combined major with other fields such as astronomy, biology, chemistry or geology; choose a combined major in physics-mathematics; or participate in one of Whitman’s 3-2 Engineering Programs with Columbia University, the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri), or the University of Washington.