The tutors have organised a review session
for the Final Exam:Extensive use of overhead transparencies is typical for my classes. Contents include quotations, images, etc. Some people like to have copies of these transparencies, and access will be available in this section. In addition brief summaries of the classes will appear below, and the entries will often include access to class notes. Neither the transparencies, summaries or class notes are intended to be a substitute for the classes themselves; we see students every year in this course who do not do as well as they should because they ignore this fact.
Also, for most people the type of information being presented in the class notes is read more effectively on paper than on a screen. Some of the notes will be offered in both html (HyperText Markup Language) and pdf (Portable Document Format). In this case, line breaks and table widths in the html document have been adjusted so that the pdf version generated from it paginates "nicely" when printed; because of the different browsers and printers in the world, controlling pagination in an html document is impossible. Reading and printing pdf documents requires that you have the Acrobat Reader, which you may get free from http://www.adobe.com.
If pdf is preferred over html for printing, the converse is also true. Studies of people using web documents indicate that for reading on-line pdf is less usable than an html version of the same document by as much as 300%.
| When | Principle Topic(s) |
|---|---|
| Class 1 - Tuesday, Jan 8, 2002 | Operational Definitions for the words wave and particle. Applying the definition to light and electrons. Investigating the behavior of electrons further. |
| Class 2 - Thursday, Jan 10, 2002 | Continuing our investigation of the Double Slit Experiment for electrons and what the results mean. |
| Class 3 - Tuesday, Jan 15, 2002 | Finished our introduction to Quantum Mechanics for now. Began discussing the Special Theory of Relativity. |
| Class 4 - Thursday, Jan 17, 2002 | Special Relativity continued. |
| Class 5 - Tuesday, Jan 22, 2002 | Special Relativity continued. |
| Class 6 - Thursday, Jan 24, 2002 | Special Relativity continued. |
| Class 7 - Tuesday, Jan 29, 2002 | Finished Special Relativity. Homework Assignment #1. |
| Class 8 - Thursday, Jan 31, 2002 | Reviewed Inertial Reference Frames. Began the General Theory of Relativity. Homework Assignment #2. |
| Class 9 - Tuesday, Feb 5, 2002 | General Relativity continued. |
| Class 10 - Thursday, Feb 7, 2002 | General Relativity continued. Homework Assignment #3. |
| Class 11 - Tuesday, Feb 12, 2002 | Finished General Relativity. |
| Thursday, Feb 14, 2002 | This was the test. |
| Class 12 - Tuesday, Feb 26, 2002 | Mirror Symmetry. |
| Class 13 - Thursday, Feb 28, 2002 | Finished Mirror Symmetry. Began AntiMatter. |
| Class 14 - Tuesday, Mar 5, 2002 | Finished AntiMattter. Homework Assignment #4. |
| Class 15 - Thursday, Mar 7, 2002 | Began Chaos. |
| Class 16 - Tuesday, Mar 12, 2002 | Finished Chaos. Schrödinger's Cat. Homework Assignment #5. |
| Class 17 - Thursday, Mar 14, 2002 | Electron Spin and Correlation Experiments. |
| Class 18 - Tuesday, Mar 19, 2002 | Began Bell's Theorem. |
| Class 19 - Thursday, Mar 21, 2002 | Finished Bell's Theorem. |
| Tuesday, Mar 26, 2002 | We had two class presentations. The first was by Solmaz Emam on the Physics of Dance; the second was by Elianna Fetterolf, Anita Corsini, and Kate Melino on Synchronicity. There is no class summary available. However, just for fun I have compiled results of the Fermi Number homework assignment, which is available here. |
| Thursday, Mar 28, 2002 |
We began with a class presentation by Jasna Maksimovic on Matter Waves, Standing Waves. I then did a small introduction to Entropy. Links to some class notes are here: html pdf. We defined the entropy and talked about how the different definitions relate to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. |
| Class 20 - Tuesday, Apr 2, 2002 | High Energy, Quark Models, the Bootstrap. |
| Thursday, April 4, 2002 | Professor Amanda Peet of this Department gave a talk on String Theory. She has made the transparancies of her talk and some references available here. |
| Tuesday, April 9, 2002 | We had two class presentations. The first was by Loni Diljohn on Time Travel. The second was by Rob Sinclair on Quantum Loop Gravity. A pdf version of Rob's PowerPoint presentation is available here. |
| Class 21 - Thursday, Apr 11, 2002 | Black Hole Thermodynamics. |
The tutors have organised a review session
for the Final Exam:
This page last revised 04/15/02 (m/d/y).