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-- Newton
PHY138 will have Representative Assemblies. These are a small group of students and me. We will talk about issues of communication and organisation in the course. We will not talk about the content of the course.
There will be three assemblies: one is for the Wednesday tutorials, one for the Thursday tutorials and the third for the Friday tutorials. Each tutorial group will choose a Representative using any method that you wish.
Each Assembly will meet every three weeks. They will be:
The first meeting will be the Assembly for Wednesday tutorials, and will meet this Friday, Sept 24 in MP713.
The STudent Online Record Management (STORM) facility provides you with a mechanism to check your:
You will need to use a login and password to access the software. These are:
The software is now ready for you to access it. The URL is:
http://www.storm.utoronto.ca/PHY138Y1Y/student/
The URL is case-sensitive and the trailing slash is required.
The lab will have its own STORM database, but not yet.
Here is a diagram of the main web pages for the theoretical part of the Mechanics section of PHY138, i.e. the lecture and tutorial components of the course this quarter. The links are also shown in red.
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Tutorials begin this week.
The final locations of the tutorial groups are still not quite finalised. Dr. Savaria promises that this will be done by tomorrow.
You can find out your tutorial group and where it meets from:
In your first tutorial, part of the time will be spent using the McDermott, Shaffer et al. workbook Tutorials in Introductory Physics. This is not the Homework booklet, which looks almost identical but says "Homework" on the lower left corner of the cover. You will do the following exercise:
Part I of the Acceleration in One Dimension activity. This is on pages Mech-11 - Mech-13 of the booklet. You will not do the other parts of the activity.
The following things are likely to appear as questions on the tests and final exam:
This assignment is due in the "Drop Boxes" for your tutorial by 5 PM on Monday, September 27. You may access the assignment, in pdf format, by clicking the button to the right. It will appear in a separate window. |
Although the tests and Final Exam in PHY138 will have many conceptual question, there will be some conventional numerical problems. In class we discussed techniques for effective solving such problems. We ended up with a list:
A lovely but more lengthy discussion of problem solving may be found by clicking the button to the right. It is in html format and will appear in a separate window. |
Chapter 1, which we began last class and finished today, deals with some aspects of Physics' description of the universe: units, coordinate systems, and vectors. Chapters 2 and 3, which we will be discussing for the next couple of classes, develops the description of motion in terms of speed, velocity, and acceleration; of course this description is largely in the language of mathematics.
All of this material will be needed for our study of Physics, but is largely just preparation for that study. We start doing "real" Physics with Chapter 4, which we should get to next Monday.
We showed some Flash animations in class. In order to view them you need the Flash player installed on your computer; it is available free from http://www.macromedia.com/. The current version of the Player is 7; if your version is less than 6 you should upgrade. You may access the animations with the links below. Each will appear in a separate window.
Illustrating the difference between distance and displacement. |
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Addition of 2 vectors |
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Addition of 3 vectors |
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Subtracting 2 vectors |
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Unit vectors |
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Adding vectors using cartesian components |
The textbook uses bold-face for vectors: A.
Since it is very hard to use bold-face when writing by hand, in class we indicate vectors by putting an arrow over the symbol, as shown to the right. |
The textbook indicates the magnitude of a vector either by putting vertical lines around it, |A|, or just writing it in a non-bold face: A.
In class we will use the same sort of notation. Either vertical lines, | , or just the letter: |
The textbook indicates unit vectors pointing in the x, y, and z directions respectively as i, j, and k.
In class, we indicate that the vectors are of length one by putting a little "hat" (a caret sign) over them. |
MasteringPhysics software uses another notation for unit vectors. It uses caret signs, as I do in class, but puts them over the letters x, y, and z instead of i, j, and k. |
We did an In-Class Question. You may access a pdf version of the question by clicking on the button to the right; it will appear in a separate window. The class did very well on this question: almost 80% or so got it correct. |
Reminder: you need at least Version 5 of the Acrobat reader to view the In-Class Questions, and I have disabled printing.
The correct answer is 2) slows down all the time.
The button to the right accesses today's Journal. Separate window. |