Course Schedule

Here is an outline of the expected structure of the course. This is the first time that I have taught this course so this is going to be only a rough guide. It is likely to be fairly accurate at first and to get steadily less and less tied to reality the further out into the future you go. This is reflected in the fact that I have not filled in all the readings yet.

Note the following abbreviations.

Week: Topics Readings Laboratory
1: 1/21

Mass on spring
Intro. to differential equations

HRW 15:1-5
Tay 1 & 2
AM 38-43

Energy and errors
2: 1/28 Driven oscillators and resonance
Inhomogeneous Linear ODEs
HRW 6-9
Tay 3
AM look at some examples
Pendulum and Errors
3: 2/4

Coupled Oscillators & Normal Modes

Tay 4

AM 71-74

Measuring g
4: 2/11 Coupled Linear ODEs
Boundary Conditions & Superposition


Resonance
5: 2/18 Waves on a string
Wave Equation, Partial Differential Equations
HRW 16:1-7
AM 258-261
Mid-term Exam I
6: 2/25 1-D Wave Equation, Normal Modes, & Superposition
Fourier Ideas
HRW 16:8-13 Standing Waves on String
7: 3/3

Waves, non-standing waves
Fourier Series

HRW 17:1-4 Speed of Sound
8: 3/10 Sound, Beats, Doppler, Instruments
Fourier Analysis & Timbre
HRW 17:5-10 Unknown
Spring Break
9: 3/31 Electric Fields
Vector Addition
HRW 22 Electrostatics Lab
10: 4/7 Electric Potentials and Energy HRW 24 Mid-Term Exam II
11: 4/14

Waves in >1-D, Light, Interference
Phase, Complex Representations

HRW 35:1-4 Field Plotting
12: 4/21

Interference, Multiple Slits, Interferometers
Phasors

HRW 35:5-8 Lenses & Images
13: 4/28 Diffraction, Slits and Edges, Intensity
Phase Integrals
HRW 36:1-10 Wavelength of Light w/ Ruler
14: 5/5 Matter waves
Ideas of a wave function and probability
HRW 38:1-6 Interference & Diffraction
5/15
Final Exam 09:00-12:00.

Physics 195