Notes on Mirrors

A draft of my notes on mirrors (which we will cover today) is available [3.6Mb PDF].

Lab procedure 25 Oct 07

Here it is. There will also be time to finish up the second part of Tuesday's lab, if you so desire.

Schedule change

If you are paying attention to the course calendar, you may have noticed that I have done some shuffling. I felt the optics chapters were a bit too crammed in, and Exam II came up a bit too fast. No new content has been introduced, and nothing has been removed, just moved a few things around.

The major change is that Exam II has been moved to 6 Nov 2007. I will go over the other changes in class.

Homework this week

You have no regular homework for this week. Don't get too excited though.

Your homework assignment for this week, due by midnight Friday, is to turn in a proposed source for your 5 page paper, due after thanksgiving. Recall the rules for the paper here.

By Friday, you must submit a source for your paper. Again, the source can be a book, magazine article, etc., see the original requirements linked above. You do not need to have the source and topic approved by Friday, merely submitted. Your submission should include:

• A complete reference for me to find said work.
• A few sentences on why you think it is interesting and/or appropriate, with regards to the paper criteria.
  

Submissions by email are preferred, though any reasonable medium will be accepted. An acceptable book reference might be an amazon.com link or a full citation. An acceptable magazine reference should include year, issue, and page number, or a link if the magazine is online. Use your judgment, but please provide me with some easy way to verify the existence and appropriateness of your source.

A "few sentences" means just that - you need not write more than a very tiny paragraph. It can be informal and very short, just justify why the source seems interesting to you and why it meets the criteria.

Optics Lab for 23 Oct 2007

Tomorrow we will start our study of optics, beginning with the nature of light, reflection, and refraction. We will combine two short labs, one on reflection and one on refraction.

You can find the procedures here.