Winter Term 2012-13
Instructor: Dr. Carl Adams Room 1006 PSC
Physics 201 is a second year course primarily aimed at science
students and physics majors that want to go beyond the topics that
were presented in PHYS 100/120. When you ask most people
what physics is they tend to respond with things they have seen on
"Big Bang Theory," Einstein's moving clock, "Brief History of
Time" and the strange quantum phenomenon of Schrödinger's
cat. In this course we will see that these topics are definitely physics and
although they might be strange, unusual, or "impossible to
understand" they are definitely real. And we'll even prove
it in the lab! The picture above shows a blackbody spectrum
where we need to assume that the electromagnetic field (a wave) is
quantised as particles (photons).
Since this is a physics course we will be speaking about things
quantitatively whenever possible but I will try to keep the math
to a 1st year calculus level with just a few, very simple
differential equations. You will also gain some insight into
where physics equations come from and what rules they need to
follow (and you will even learn that many of them are
wrong!). If you are non-physics student but are scared to
take this course, don't be. Many of my best students are
non-physics students and in any given year roughly 25% of the
class is made up of non-physics students.
The experimental lab is a significant part of this course.
Follow this link for lab resources.
This is the course outline and
the link
to previous tests.
Come on by and visit me! I have time available to help you
with the course.
Notifications: