Greetings and welcome to the home page for Physics 121: Classical and Modern Physics I
Taught by Dr. Don Smith The syllabus contains lots of information about the course and my expectations for it. Please read it carefully.
Homework Assignments
Homework assignments will be posted here (in a table below)
least a week beforehand, so you have time to work on them. Make sure
to check this page often. Homework problems will come in two types: (1) short answer questions, in which you will give (and explain) an answer to a question, and (2) analysis problems, in which you will derive a formula or calculate a number. Your answers to the questions should be in clear, correct english. Your solutions for analysis problems must contain at least four parts for each problem:
Homework solutions must be clear and legible. If you cannot write clearly by hand, you may use LaTeX to typeset electronic copies of your homework. No other electronic homework format will be accepted. Note that some of the due dates for reading assignments will be hyperlinks. If a date is a hyperlink, that means that there is a pre-flight quiz associated with that hyperlink. Each day's reading will be associated with a "preflight quiz", three questions that check your comprehension of the assigned readings and occasionally get you thinking about the issues they raise. You can get to the forms that contain the quizzes by clicking on the linked dates in the course schedule, below. You will have been given a login and password in class. You will not be graded on getting the right answers, only on your participation in submitting an answer. Answers must be submitted by 1 am the night before (that is, the morning that) the material is to be discussed in class. Late answers will be saved, but you will not receive credit for the quiz. Note that IT&S has not allowed me to put the computer that hosts the quizzes outside the firewall. This means that they cannot be accessed from off-campus. You can set up a "virtual private network" to tunnel in to the campus computers. See here for instructions on how to do that.
Laboratory Experiments There will be two laboratory sections for Physics 121. They will be taught by Professor Emeritus Rexford Adelberger. Rex will hold office hours in Frank 234A. All the information about the labs, including a schedule and assignment instructions, can be found at Rex's lab page here. Please keep current on his instructions as well as mine.
LaTeX LaTeX is a type-setting program that is often used for scientific publications. It was originally developed by a math professor who got frustrated with trying to create equations in Microsoft Word and wanted a better way to do it. It has since grown into an incredibly powerful publishing tool that is used by most professional journals. In this class, we'll only scratch the surface of its capabilities, but your experience here will provide a useful skill if you continue in science. LaTeX bypasses the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that programs like Word present to the user. You write a text document that has embedded commands in it. These commands tell the typesetting program how to shape the look of the final document. If you have ever written an HTML web page, or even seen the source code for a page (feel free to look at the source code for this page as an example), you will be familiar with the idea. As you work with LaTeX, you may want to install a copy on your own home computer, so you don't have to come in to the lab all the time. If you have a linux computer, it usually comes installed as part of the standard package. For a Mac, the software we use here is TeXShop. If you are unfortunate enough to have to work with Windows, you can get the basic LaTeX distribution here, and then install a GUI wrapper program that you can get here. LaTeX usually confronts you with a steep learning curve (I guarantee you that you will want to destroy your computer on occasion because of it), but once you get the hang of it, particularly once you start writing longer and more complex documents, you'll never want to use anything else. Here are some introductory documents to help you get ready to use LaTeX:
Useful Links Table of Scales in the Universe A discussion on how to propogate uncertainties A sample MatLab program to perform a Lorentz transformation. I've taken out some of the guts of the program to allow you the practice of writing your own. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
