Physics 2D, Fall 2020, Reading ahead assignments
Modern physics is firmly rooted in classical physics. To fully grasp the new material it is important that you refresh your knowledge of the related topics that
you learned (or should have learned) in previous courses. Please read ahead the following items
to prepare for the topics for each week. The numbers
indicated between () refer to the sections or pages in the
textbook by Halliday, Resnick and Walker (HRW), Fundamentals of Physics.
If you have the Wolfson and Pasachoff text instead, see
here
for section numbers.
If you have a different text find the equivalent
sections by looking up the table of contents or keywords in the alphabetical index in the back of
the textbook.
For Week1 (Relativity I), read ahead about:
- Inertial frames, galilean invariance and relative motion (Sect. 4-8, 4-9 Halliday-Resnick-Walker)
- Speed of light (Sect. 33-3 HRW)
- Doppler shift (17-9 HRW)
For Week2 (Relativity II), read ahead about:
- Newton's second law (HRW 5-6)
- Work-energy theorem (HRW 7-5)
- Collisions and momentum conservation (HRW 9-4, 9-5, 9-6)
- Law of universal gravitation (HRW 13-2)
For Week3 (Planck's law), read ahead about:
- Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution (HRW 19-7), equipartition (HRW 19-9)
- Maxwell's equations, electromagnetic waves (HRW 33-3, 33-4)
- Definition of "Power" (HRW 7-9)
- Power in radiation (HRW 33-5)
For Week4,5 (The nuclear atom), read ahead about:
- Coulomb law (HRW 21-4) and electric field (HRW 22-2, 22-4)
- Magnetic force (HRW 28-3)
- Electric field of a uniformly charged sphere (HRW 23-9)
- Uniform circular motion (HRW 4-7)
- Angular momentum (HRW 11-7)
For Week6 (Matter waves), read ahead about:
- Waves and wave motion (HRW 16-2, 16-3, 16-4, 16-5
- Standing waves (HRW 16-12)
- Wave interference (HRW 16-10, 17-5, 37-2)
For Week7,8 (Schrodinger equation), read ahead about:
- Wave equation (HRW 16-8)
- Potential energy (HRW 8-2)
- Conservation of mechanical energy (HRW 8-5)
- Force and potential energy (HRW 8-6)
- Simple harmonic motion (HRW 15-2, 15-3, 15-4)
- Reflection and transmission of waves (HRW 33-8)
- Electric potential and potential energy (HRW 24-2,24-3)
For Week9, 10 (Atomic physics), read ahead about:
- Conservation of angular momentum (HRW 11-11)
- Refresh your memory on spherical coordinates
- Current loop as magnetic dipole (HRW 28-10)