The Physics version was the hardest course I experienced, spending hours coming up with closed form solutions. Rarely were any actual numbers used when solving these problems. On the M.E. side, once a sufficient set of equations were derived to model the problem we would use a computer to come up with a numerical solution that was close enough.
The Physics course had no tests and consisted of roughly 30 problems we had our whole college career to complete. The M.E. course had tests where we were under time constraints to present a numerical answer.
While the M.E. course was more "practical", the the I remember about the topic in general are retained from the Physics course.
All that to say that I think there is a ton of value to a classic Physics curriculum but most of that value is indirect.
That sounds like a really interesting way of evaluating students - where was that?
However, it was not a department thing. It was a particular prof that ran the course this way.
Other profs taught the same course in a more traditional manner.
I feel I was taught these things very inefficiently, though. Teaching tended to recapitulate the historical sequence in which the formalisms for each subject were developed, rather than developing the modern perspective from the outset. For example, Hamiltonians are typically taught in a final-year classical mechanics course (if they appear at all), but if they were taught early then statistical mechanics, electrodynamics and quantum mechanics would all be much easier. This even gives you a nice entry point to techniques for simulations via perturbative methods.
I'm not a physicist, though, so maybe there is some deep underlying reason for the way the curriculum is set up.
What's even more sad is many of the students hold the blind belief that the school will provide them with a quality education, but in reality the professors look to cut corners at every possible step. The students who then go on to accelerate their own education are generally looked down upon as well, unless of course they act as propaganda pieces as well and make sure not to go too far so that the professors don't look bad.
It's a depressing situation which will only be remedied by figuring out how to democratize mathematics education completely. Unfortunately, I've only seen such efforts at extraordinarily high levels so that only beginning researchers who have been lucky enough to get advisors as a top 10 university will be able to readily access these materials.
If you really want my opinion, it's that it sounds like you had a regrettable experience with undergraduate math education and maybe are overgeneralizing from that a little bit. But that's just my opinion, possibly wrong and definitely irrelevant.
Do you have a cite or explanation for this claim? Sure, particle physics is mostly software these days, but I don't think this is true for anywhere near a majority of physicists.
Analytical work dominates in high-energy theory, quantum information, mathematical physics, cosmology theory. I'll also dispute your characterization of quantum gravity with my own anecdotal experience. If we wanted to solve this, I think we'd just open up an issue of Physical Review and count whether more than half the papers are numerical.
Outside big collaborations (e.g., particles, astronomy), my impression is that most experimental work is not writing code even though rudimentary code is of course needed for data analysis and equipment control.
We're on a site for programers, so I think the former physicists who happen to be here are unrepresentative.
Yes, but most physicists are not theorists.
Teaching physics is a hard problem because there's a long and rich history of building upon previous advancements. You can't teach somebody quantum chromodynamics without first teaching them quantum electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics, classical mechanics, and all of the mathematical methods that come along with these. It's hard to legitimately get anywhere close to the cutting edge in graduate school, let alone as an undergraduate. I hope that this has changed somewhat in the last decade, but most of the teaching methods in these subjects have historically been unchanged since the 70s. I strongly believe that it would be better preparation, for both academia and the real world, to integrate much more of an emphasis on simulation, visualization, and numerical methods into these requisite courses. These would be far more constructive for people developing skills that they simply can't get from doing problems on paper.