Those of us who employ cyclotrons would dispute that "all modern accelerators are either linear accelerators or synchrotrons". Note that there are isochronous cyclotrons that craft the magnetic field to keep the cyclotron frequency constant as the relativistic mass increases.

@JohnDoty Thanks for the comment. I have edited to include the isochronous cyclotron. And I suppose I meant high energy accelerators meant to discover new fundamental physics... indeed there are still cyclotrons all over the word that are used as injectors for synchrotrons, rare isotope production, biological and materials research, etc.

Fundamental? Fundamental physics is things like falling apples, magnets and coils, etc. I believe the word you want is "recherché".

@JohnDoty I googled "what is fundamental physics" and the first page of links all gave definitions that are basically what I meant to describe, not what you're describing which I would call "basic or introductory physics." For example imperial.ac.uk/physics/research/themes/fundamental-physics

Thus, we have all the "end of physics" nonsense. Thus, our students can't light a bulb: youtube.com/watch?v=aIhk9eKOLzQ. We don't teach the real fundamentals. We have an antihistorical concept of what the fundamentals are. When you build a structure, the foundation is the first thing you make.

@JohnDoty I'm just trying to use commonly accepted terminology. Do you really think this comment section is the right place to debate this? In some sense "fundamental physics" is the perfect expression, because we understand these concepts to be the underlying cause of all other kinds of physics - still "fundamental", but in a different sense than you're using. Besides, I'm not sure which fundamentals exactly you think "we" aren't teaching. Every physics major's first course is basic Newtonian mechanics, then usually the second course is basic E+M. Nobody is teaching high energy physics first.

@AXensen No The concepts do not cause the phenomena. The phenomena are the origin of the concepts. The concepts capture the patterns we observe in the phenomena.

@AXensen We apparently aren't teaching basic E+M, because our students can't light a bulb.

I'm not sure what the distinction is between "cause X" and "origin of X"

If I wanted to be pedantically perfect I might say "more basic phenomena like the behavior of circuits can be derived (with great difficulty) from the the laws that govern high energy particle physics, but not vice versa" But this is the comment section to a question about limitations of synchrotrons... not really meant to be a philosophy of science discussion.

as for the light bulbs... I'm not really astonished. They weren't physcis majors but even if they were I wouldn't be all that surprised - most physics majors have one semester of circuits, which doesn't necessarily include household light bulbs.

But I don't agree that it proves some grand failure of physics education... a physics major gets courses in physics... there isn't any course where they just teach you a bunch of basic common sense things about household appliances and simple technologies.

I guess my point is... everybody who knows how the muon decays probably also knows laplace's equation (more "basic" in my terminology). Not everybody who knows how the muon decays knows which outlet hole is neutral. I don't consider that to be a great tragedy, and it doesn't make me question their ability to do physics research.

@AXensen The MIT students in question all had a year of physics (it was MIT, after all). And how can you possibly comprehend E&M if you don't understand that we call things circuits because current travels in circles?

The phenomena behind circuits were understood before the phenomena of high energy physics, and that understanding was fundamental. Go read the introduction to "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".

I'm trying to make the point that there are two possible senses of the word "fundamental" or the phrase "more fundamental"... it can either be "this should be understood first for pedagogical purposes" or it can mean "this is the underlying reason that something happens"

when we say "fundamental physics" we mean it in the latter sense.

and you can understand E+M without understanding circuits... because the E+M taught in a first semester course is actually a lot simpler and easier to understand than circuits

@AXensen We should never subscribe to the delusion that we know the "underlying reason". Galileo performed fundamental measurements on falling bodies. But his notion of an "underlying reason" was replaced by Newton's, and that was replaced by Einstein's.

@AXensen I learned enough in fourth grade science class to be able to connect a battery to a light bulb.

galileos results can be derived from newton (and not vice versa). And newton's from einstein

@AXensen Yes, we have compatible models. But who can say that Einstein's is the last word, the underlying reason? It's just another model, with strengths (generality) and weaknesses (very difficult to apply).

I'm really not all that interested in the philosophy of science discussion about "what does it mean for something to cause something"... when I say "more fundamental" I mean "X can be derived as a limit of Y" and nothing else. And I'm pretty sure that's what most physicists mean.

NOBODY says einstein's field equations are the last word in the physics of gravity

@AXensen This is important, because it leads us to badly educate our students. They don't learn physics, but merely whiteboard cartoons of mathematical models. Our students should see physics happening all around them, all the time.

as for this light bulb business... I'm working on my phd in physics and I've been generally happy with the order in which things were taught. If you want to rework all of physics education to teach things in the order they were discovered be my guest and write that cirriculum. I was taught how circuits work pretty late in that process, because circuits are actually pretty hard to explain to a physicist.

If you wanted to be an electrical engineer you would learn a lot earlier, because there's a functional description of circuits that ignores a lot of E+M justification for why circuits work like that that can be taught a lot sooner.

I personally absolutely do see physics all around me. But I'm an experimental physicist. I acknowledge there are theorist professors who are pretty weak with "everyday physics" and might struggle to light the bulb... but I appreciate the time they've spent learning enough math to contribute to such a technically difficult field. They have a different skill-set than me

@AXensen Why do you call physics that can be taught in fourth grade "pretty hard to explain to a physicist"?

but explaining how you get from laplace's equation to the behavior of circuits is not that simple...

Ah, but I was taught circuits.

for example conductors are, I think, chapter 7 or so of Griffiths E+M

That's because you're taking an excessively abstract route.

well the people who do physics majors don't want to build circuits, they want to contribute to fundamental physics. It sounds like maybe you want to throw fundamental physics in the trash but there are a lot of people who are interested in that and want to work on it

it kind of sounds like you're insisting "everybody needs to be interested in the aspects of physics that im interested in, and everybody who is interested in the beginning of hte universe is a moron because that's not what im interested in"

I love recherché physics. Black holes pay the mortgage ;-)

But they're not fundamental. The blue sky overhead is fundamental.

I want to give you credit though, I have theorists friends who can't explain why a rainbow appears through the edge of a piece of glass... and frankly that makes me lose respect for them and doubt the validity of their work. I think something along the lines of "if you have that poor physical intuition, it seems unlikely that you can correctly interpret the physical consequences of these advanced mathematical theories you're working on"

again. two senses of the word fundamental. you mean one, and typically I mean the other. neither sense is wrong

blue sky is an excellent example of something "basic" that a physics student unfortunately has to learn much later in life because the explanation from fundamental physics (in my sense of the word fundamental) is difficult

Blue sky is antenna theory in disguise. Antennas are easy to make (if a bit subtle to test). So, you want to understand blue sky, make an antenna. Much more physical than a whiteboard cartoon.

I'm not really seeing your vision of a new, better version of physics education

you think they should build an antenna and do some observations on it instead of what...

instead of leanring the mathematical description of an antenna?

@AXensen The mathematical description of an antenna is mathematics, not physics. And it's only mathematics if you can't relate it to real, physical objects. This is a good example, too, of how abstraction can get in the way. Careful electromagnetic modeling of antennas is difficult, but simple, pragmatic, models can take you a long way.