Homework 1

is out. Due at the end of the lab period Monday (so you can ask me or the TAs questions in lab ...)

The first problem is tricky. Discussions of it are easy to find online, we will go over it in lecture on Monday a bit.

Slides from today

are here.

Monday we start with electrostatics, so that's your reading for the weekend. We'll be done with relativity for a little while, so things will get conceptually a lot easier (less confusing!) but mathematically a bit more difficult (in particular, vectors).

If you're feeling lost

don't fret it just yet. Special relativity is probably among the most conceptually difficult material we will cover all semester, and it involves relatively subtle arguments and reasoning. (Oddly enough, the math is straightforward.)

So, if you felt a bit lost during today's lecture, don't worry, it is not at all unusual. It will take time for the arguments and really the necessity of relativity to coalesce properly for you, it probably isn't going to happen just listening to me for 45 minutes. Read through the notes (really read, don't just scan for highlighted items), read through your textbook, and don't hesitate to ask me if there is something you're not getting.

It will still be weird even when you think you understand it. The weird won't go away, but the confusion will. There is a difference - weird can still be logically consistent or even a necessity to have logical consistency.

Slides for lecture 1 & 2

Here are some slides I'll be using for today's lecture, as well as part of tomorrow's.

Video of previous lectures

Back in the summer of 2008, I made videos of a good fraction of my PH102 lectures. Not everything is there, but you might find them useful as the semester wears on. You should also check out iTunes U, lots of nice lectures there, as well as an iPad/iPhone app.

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.