Greetings and welcome to the home page for Physics 231: Experimental Physics I
Taught by Dr. Don Smith The syllabus contains much more information about the course. Please read it carefully. Note: The following table was initially constructed before the semester began, assuming two weeks per experiment. You are allowed, when you pick your experiment, to slide the due date to a week later. Consider the due dates below to be tentative until the name of the experiment appears in the final column instead of a number. Once the name appears in that last column, I will consider the date in the first column to be the due date. Extensions will not be granted on the day of the presentation, but may be requested up until the previous day.
The numbers represent my best guess as to how much work will be involved in doing the experiment. (1) means a lot of work, (2) means even more work than a lot of work, and (3) means I think you'll find it very challenging. :-) You might want to try to find a balance. Note that Magnetic Force, Magnetic Moment, and Susceptibility of Aluminum are all fairly similar. You might wish to only do one of these, to have a wider range of experience. Or you might want to delve deeper into a similar topic, in which case start with Magnetic Force and go to one of the other two. Other ideas: There are some other experiments we might be able to pull together, if you are interested. That is, I've seen the equipment around, but I'm not sure if it's complete and/or functional. For Brownian Motion, I would need to find out if the biology department has the microscope we would need. If you really want to do one of these, talk to me and we'll see if we can't make it work...
There are a lot of other experiment ideas in the journals "The Physics Teacher" and "The American Journal of Physics". You can peruse back issues in my office or online, if you want to see more options. If you want to do an experiment for which we do not have the equipment, you can write a short proposal to the department, and we have several thousand dollars available through alumni donations to support student research ideas. We can make it happen. You should read this article on how to give good presentations. If there aren't any lab notebook sheets on the door, you can get one here. Also, here's my Tips on giving good PowerPoint presentations file. It has a rubric for evaluating talks in it, as well as examples of good and bad slides. Here are some links to other schools' advanced lab web sites. They may be useful to you, in terms of practical advice, historical background, conceptual support, and/or challenging questions to think about. Many of them may be for more advanced experiments than we will do in this course: keep them in mind for 232 or higher. You could also use google to search for Intermediate lab sites. If you find any useful sites at other schools, please let me know so I can include them here. If you do use any of these materials, make sure you cite them in your presentation. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
