[lordnacho]

It's common, most of the people I know from the UK system did their PhD in 3-4 years.

In Europe you just study what it says as well. You happy to do a bachelor's in physics, your classes are all physics. You don't read shakespeare and learn french.

You can also do this in high school, so you can from age 16 be studying just physics and math.

[EvgeniyZh]

I did none of my degrees in US, and my physics degree was 95% math and physics. Physics degree is quite sequential anyway. You can't do QM in your first year or QFT in your second year.

I've checked random people I know from oxford and none started after 3-year undergrad and those how did after 4 all did 4 year dphil (small sample size warning). 4+4 is reasonable.

[lowbloodsugar]

Maybe things have changed. We did QM in our first year at Imperial. I suppose we have to make allowances for Oxford. Got to fit the poetry in somewhere. =)

[BeetleB]

Obvious disclaimer: At this point we are talking about outlier colleges/universities.

But to give some examples, I know colleges (both in US and abroad) where people did real analysis and abstract algebra in their first year (and why not - neither requires prerequisites other than maturity).

I know a college (in the US) where they did Jackson for E&M in the 3rd year (and some advanced students did in the 2nd year). In most US universities, people normally do Jackson in the first year of their PhD.

I think it's rare to do QM before 2nd year, but in principle, as long as you know calculus/diff eq, you can get going on it. The catch is that the interesting applications require other branches of physics (e.g. E&M). When I did QM, all those applications were part of QM II anyway.

But yes, again, these are outliers and I wouldn't want to say it's the norm in the whole country.