Quiz 2 and its solution ...

... can be found here.

Quiz for Fri 25 Jan 08 / Notes updates

As a friendly reminder ... the quiz questions tomorrow will be taken directly from the "Quick Questions" at the end of chapter 3 in the notes (look here or here). Solutions to the "Quick Questions" are also provided in the notes. If you can answer these correctly, you are set for the quiz.

Note that these questions did not make it into the printed notes last semester, they are only in the online version. You can download only the chapter 3 questions & answers from this separate file.

Random notes-related news:

1. I have fixed some typos and errors in Ch. 3, almost all of them in the Gauss' law section and the solution to problem #3. The latest version is online.

2. In the notes directory (here) I have made PDF of chapter 3 alone, called "electrostatics_only," if you don't want to download the whole thing.

3. In case you haven't noticed, all URLs and cross references in the notes are active links. For example, if you see the phrase "as shown in Sect. 3.2" you should be able to click on the "3.2" and go directly to that section. Same goes for figure and equation numbers, chapter numbers, URLs, etc. This is very handy in the table of contents especially for jumping right to the section you want.

(On most versions of Acrobat reader, this should be obvious, all links will be boxed. If you use, e.g., Preview on a Mac, they are not boxed, but the cursor changes when you hover over a link)

Physics Movies

Some neat little animations to explain various physics concepts, here.

Scroll down about half way to "point charges" and you will start to see some animations describing what we talked about this week (and what is coming up).

Also: check out the iTunes University. Free video lectures from many institutes, including many on our favorite subject ... the lectures by Walter Lewin of MIT (course 8.02) are usually very entertaining.

Quiz #1

The solution to quiz #1 (relativity) is now up. You can find the original quiz and solution here.

Note: there was a typo in the choices for question 1. As a result of this, everyone was given credit for the first question. This is already reflected in the grade book - even if you got your quiz back and it has the first question marked wrong, I have corrected your score in my records.

Homework 2 ...

... probably seems a lot more difficult than the last one. It is! But, by the end of the week, you will be able to handle these problems. We will go over several of the problems in class on Thursday (#2, #4, and #7 probably) as well, just to get you started.

In the mean time, you can ask questions in the comments here, or on the facebook page, and I will get to them as soon as I can.

Finally ... here are a few random hints on how to get started. Number 7 is just tough, we will do most of this in class.

UPDATE (3pm, 23 Jan): The hints now include some handy diagrams for question 7. The geometry is a bit tricky ... if you follow these figures, it should be easier.

Exercises for 22 Jan 08

Tomorrow we will be doing some small electrostatics simulations and getting a feel for Coulomb's law. The procedure is here, but you will not be able to access the applets without the username & password I will give out in class.

Direct link to the applets, which will be useful once you start tomorrow.