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.

Lab for Thursday (18 Oct 07)

Here you go. Ac circuits and filters.

Basically, this is the stuff that makes your stereo work. Though the lab is couched in terms of the phase-shifted response in RC circuits, what we will really make is a low-pass filter, which is useful for separating the audio signals that should be sent to a woofer. A high-pass filter is what sends the signal to the tweeter. Hopefully, those last sentences will make sense by the end of Tuesday!

Also, by the end of Tuesday, you will see how a bunch of high-pass and low-pass filters together make an audio crossover, or equalizer.

So, if physics hasn't seemed useful yet, by the end of this week it will at least explain how your stereo works. This lab goes to eleven.

---

I'm feeling generous. Three bonus homework points for the first person to leave a comment identifying the movie referenced in the above post. Just leave your name and the name of the appropriate movie in a comment to this post ...

Paper details

As I have mentioned a few times before, you have a 5 page paper this semester.

It won't be too bad.

Here are the details, subject to change. You need to choose a source ... soon.

The Plan for this week (15-29 Oct 07)

Ok. Due to my absence for the last half of the week, we'll do things a bit differently this week.

Short-attention-span version: double lecture Tues, no lecture Thurs.

Detailed version:

(1) I am gone for a conference from 17 until 20 Oct

• accessible via email to an extent
• it is easier to alter the schedule than to find a sub

(2) on Tuesday 16 Oct:

• finish unit on induction
• start and finish and ac circuits unit (short)
• double lecture, no lab

(3) on Thursday 18 Oct:

• no lecture, only lab
• ac circuits lab
• short induction lab

(4) for Friday 19 Oct:

• next homework set due (already assigned)
• covers (mostly) magnetic induction
• quiz covering magnetism and induction

(5) During the last half of the week

• you are responsible for reading the section on EM waves!
• it is not difficult, but we may not get to it in class
• it will, however, `be on the test'
• in the course notes or the Serway book

(6) Starting next week: optics

• for better or worse, we will be mostly done with E&M