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[26 Jan. 1956]

Dear folks:

Next semester's courses will not be terribly different from this year's. However, as time passes they do tend to get more interesting. One gets out of classical physics and into modern. Classical physics is a well worked over field in which people have been spending years working out more and more refined solutions to the same problems. Some very elegant and quite difficult ones date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Studying such material does not give one the feeling of being on the brink of great new discoveries. Next year I will be introduced to the sacred mysteries of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and thus will begin to get an idea of what has been happening in physics since 1904.
As for the length of time it will take, that is quite variable. It is supposed to take two years. People have been known to do it in two years. As least, I have heard a rumor to that effect. This assumes that you start your thesis work a year after you get the master's and spend a year finishing it.
The trouble comes in the thesis work. Let me give you a case history. When I was an undergraduate here in 1949-50, a beginning graduate student named Malmberg was in one of my classes. He seemed a bright fellow, and if I ever thought of him in the years after I left here I imagined him a happy physicist somewhere. A few months ago a fellow I often work with started talking about the unhappy man he was working under at the Betatron Laboratory. This unhappy man had just discovered that unless he could discover some fantastically clever way of improving his experiment it would take him about eighty years continuous running of