Rileys Freaky Fridays

Hi! Gud Morning.

There are lots of good physics schools. There are, of course, the usual suspects:

I don’t think you can go wrong with any Ivy, but Harvard and Princeton are probably the best. Yale and Cornell are also great.

MIT and Caltech are probably the best of the best.

Stanford and Berkeley are also right up there.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few. The schools above will be great in any area of physics. If you are looking for a specific area of physics, you can come up with a few more that are good in just a few fields of physics.

When you say ‘quantum physics’, you have to realize that that isn’t a field of physics, it’s a topic in physics. There are very few fields of physics that don’t require quantum physics. The only one I can think of that doesn’t is geophysics. And maybe astrophysics, but I think there are subfields of astrophysics that do use quantum. So you need to be more specific about what you mean by quantum physics. My guess is either you mean quantum field theory, quantum information, or AMO (atomic, molecular and optical). If you were thinking AMO physics, Colorado, UT Austin, and Maryland all have a very strong faculty in that field. In quantum information, I think MIT and Caltech are the best.

Of course, as an undergraduate, you are just trying to build a foundation of knowledge and you won’t begin to specialize to any great extent until you are in graduate school. Therefore, you should look for schools that are generally good in physics. Any school that is good in physics generally will be good enough in any specific topic to satisfy your curiosity through the bachelors degree. I would look for schools that are good at getting undergraduates involved in research. On that count, I know both MIT and Caltech are excellent, and most of the other schools mentioned should be good as well. I would pick up a copy of the US News report on graduate schools to look through. They will have a section on graduate physics programs, but if it is good in graduate physics, it will probably be pretty good at the undergraduate level. The US News on undergrad programs doesn’t breakdown schools into physics programs specifically.