Redesigning courses and textbooks for the twenty-first century

There is evidence that a confluence of pressures to change the current physics syllabus is building from many sources. Texts for science and engineering students do not usually have much contemporary physics content. There is a need to update textbooks to include areas of current interest in physics research, to include important facets of 20th-century physics that have gone virtually unnoticed in the present generation of physics textbooks. The consequence of additions of topics must be restructuring of the physics curriculum and may lead to corresponding deletions among topics presently discussed.