Hints on HW 1

Here you go [PDF], hints on 6, 8, and 10. Given that we did 2 others in class already ... you should be good to go.

We'll also go over what MeV means in recitation tomorrow. I forgot to mention that this is a unit of energy commonly used when talking about particles and stuff, my bad. It is covered in the Serway book. Basically, the 'eV' part means 'electron volt', and the 'M' and 'G' are metric prefixes for one million (10^6) and one billion (10^9), respectively. 1eV = 1.6 x 10^-19 Joules.

This means 1MeV = 10^6 eV = one million electron volts = 1.6 x 10^-13 Joules, and 1GeV = one billion joules = 1.6 x 10^-10 J.

Basically, when you see 'eV' that is just an alternate unit of energy, nothing more. The rest energy of a proton is 939MeV, which is useful for one of the problems ...