Welcome to PH102!

At the bottom of this page, or here, you will find our course calendar, which you should review carefully. Note that if you click on any lab event, you will see a link to the relevant lab procedure. A separate table of the laboratory experiments can be found here. We will stick to our schedule rigidly, as our time is quite short over the summer semester. 

You may also want to look over the course syllabus and other information, which you can find here. The slides I'll present in lecture tomorrow will also show up online shortly, I will let you know separately in a follow-up post.

Finally, I have written some fairly lengthy notes for this course, and my lectures will follow these notes for the most part. For this week, we'll be covering relativity, which is Ch. 1 in my notes.

Grade updates / last class

If you gave me lab grades that needed to be corrected, I think those should all be done now. Please check through your lab grades and see that everything makes sense. The paper grades (lab 1) are in now as well - so if you wrote a paper, make sure you got a grade ...

The only outstanding grades other than exam 3 are now the Planck's constant lab and the last HW due Wed night. We'll go over those problems in class tomorrow (Wed) so you can get them done quickly after the exam [I'm just going to go ahead and assume many of you are putting the last one off, it seems reasonable].

Tomorrow's lecture is being decided right now ... probably we will go over energy levels in atoms and solids, but one never knows what I might do at the last moment. In any case, tomorrow's lecture material will not be on the exam.

Today's lab

We'll measure Planck's constant.

The optics HW is extended until tomorrow night.

Today

I am sorry for the last-minute notice, but there will not be a lecture today. There will be a lab at the usual time.

Wednesday's lab: ac circuits

Here you go.

New HW out

Due Thursday at midnight, induction/ac circuits/em waves.

The next homework after that will likely be due Saturday or Sunday. 

Thursday's lab

We'll study inductance in tomorrow's lab. You'll learn how this works in tomorrow's lecture before the lab. Also, plenty of demos on induction and magnetism tomorrow.

And, good job on the transistors lab - it went better than I thought it would, and everyone's circuits worked in the end. As you can see, however, real circuits often require a little 'fiddling' to get the working, even when the paper versions look just fine ...

Short homework on magnetism out ...

due Friday night. Should not be too bad, we'll go over many of them on Friday.

HW3 is out

All about circuits; due next Tuesday at midnight.

Relativity HW extended

I'll push the deadline for the relativity HW until Friday so you can worry about the test more efficiently.

This will not affect the HW2 deadline, nor the occurrence of HW3 shortly thereafter.

(This is for Dr. LeClair's section only. Dr. Mazumdar may or may not decide to do the same.)

HW1 is out

For Dr. LeClair's section: your first HW (on relativity) is out on MasteringPhysics now, due Monday at midnight. We'll go over some of the questions in class on Monday.

Last homework

Here you go. It is due at the start of the final exam.

This homework is just a small review of sorts, with a little stronger emphasis on recent things. They are good practice questions for the final, one or two might even show up in nearly the same form on the final.

(Of course, this small homework set does not cover all the material. More practice problems will be posted tonight that cover most of the remaining material.)

Final exam time

Thursday, 2pm: FINAL EXAM for 1-2:45 class
Friday, 8am: FINAL EXAM for 10-11:45 class

No, I don't like the 8am exam either, and I always seem to get that slot. Nope, I don't know why the exam time isn't the same as the class time ... that would make sense ... I've been wondering that for 5 years now. Not much we can do about it, but at least it is just one day.

If for some reason you have a conflict with the final exam time (a conflict which is more serious than 'it is way early and I don't want to get up,' for instance another final exam), we should talk soon to arrange something else.

Grades / this week

I just posted Quiz 6 & 7 grades on Moodle, the homework grades will be updated later tonight.

Tomorrow, your quiz is on photons - energy per photon (E=hf), intensity of a beam of photons, etc.

Wednesday, several things will happen.
1) During the lab sessions, there will be a chance for review.
2) There is no real lab, you'll do the post-assessment test (worth some bonus points) and evaluations.
3) I will discuss a few things related to the logistics of the final exam.

Later tonight, I will be posting details about the final exam, and how to review for it. Tonight and tomorrow I'll be posting some of the HW and quiz solutions so you can use them for studying as well.

Finally, I will there will be a possibility for extra credit I'll post about tonight or in the morning.*

*If you have >90% in the class, I really don't want to see an extra credit assignment from you. I'll go over formal ground rules for the extra credit tomorrow, but it is not meant to be an insurance policy for those of you already getting a solid "A." The idea is to have a way to boost your grade if you're on the border line, etc.

Monday's lecture

Monday, we'll start on Quantum Physics, and you'll do an associated lab on atomic spectra. I'll post that procedure tomorrow when the server is powered up again ... the power is off across most of campus!

UPDATE: servers are back up. Here is tomorrow's lab.

No quiz tomorrow. Be ready for one on Tuesday, and a review homework due Wednesday. Really, it will help with the studying ...

Today's lab

ac circuits.

Quiz tomorrow (Wed)

Reminder, there is a short quiz tomorrow on ac circuits. Basically, filters, entirely qualitative.

Exam II this Thursday

Exam II is this Thursday. Same as last time, it will be held during the lab period, and we will have a lecture that day as well. The format will be nominally identical: you can skip 2 of the problems, you can bring a formula sheet, there won't be any multiple choice. I'll provide the basic formulas, also like last time. Basically, same thing, different material.

For the material, here's what it looks like:

Covered on exam II

• Book Ch. 18 (notes Ch. 5): end of dc circuits (combining resistors, multiple loops)
• Book Ch. 19 (notes Ch. 6) Magnetism (nothing on Ampere's law or the relativity stuff)
• Book Ch. 20 (notes Ch. 7) Induction
• Book Ch. 21 (notes Ch. 8) ac circuits (filters and audio circuits, basically)
• Book Ch. 21 (notes Ch. 8) EM waves (very little there, honestly.)
• Book Ch. 22 (notes Ch. 9) reflection / refraction (mirrors, refraction; no lenses)

The questions will be a bit heavier on circuits, magnetism, and induction (maybe 2 questions each) with not so much on EM waves or the start of optics (maybe 1 question each). More details to follow as the week proceeds ...

I will not make this exam purposely more difficult than the last one. However, most people find this material harder than the material from the first exam, in my experience. If you study the old homework & exam questions, you will probably be fine (presuming you've kept up with reading the notes or textbook).

Next homework

HW 6 is out, due Tuesday night. We'll go over some of them in class Monday, and the rest on Tuesday.

Monday

I've been a little bit ill this weekend, and have fallen behind ...

Monday (tomorrow) there will be a short quiz on induction (Friday's lecture) with an related lab.

Tuesday night, you'll have a homework set due, it should come out later tonight or early Monday morning.