| Professor Henry Greenside | hsg@phy.duke.edu | 919-660-2548 | Room 097 |
| Cate Marcoux, Teaching Assistant | ccm26@phy.duke.edu | 919-660-2549 | Room 094 |
| Victor Bai, Homework Grader | baimingru.duke@hotmail.com |
Recitations will be held on Wednesdays from 1:15-3:15 PM in Physics 150. These are informal weekly opportunities to collaborate on problems in groups and with the professor and TA. Most recitations will finish with a 25-minute quiz on the material covered since the previous quiz. You will want to bring your laptop to recitation so you can refer to the online Knight textbook and perhaps use Mathematica for parts of the homework.
A two-hour-long lab will be held in Room 146 about once every two weeks on Thursdays, from 1:15-3:15 PM or from 3:30-5:30 PM.
If will be helpful if you can take Math 212 (multivariate calculus) during or before Physics 162. While 212 is not a prerequisite, some multivariate calculus will be introduced and discussed during the semester, including topics such vector fields, gradients, line integrals, surface integrals, flux, and Gauss's law. Physics 162 and Math 212 complement each other well, the former helps to motivate the latter, and the latter helps one technically with the former.
Note: if you got a 5 in the AP Physics C electricity and magnetism exam and have taken multivariate calculus or more advanced math courses, you should meet with Professor Greenside no later than the end of the first week of classes to discuss whether it will be worthwhile to take Physics 162. The key issue is whether you will be prepared to take Physics 264L ("Modern Physics") if you don't take 162; 264 is too hard if a student knows only high school AP physics C and high school AP calculus. In the past, most physics and biophysics majors have found taking 162 worthwhile, even when they had a 5 on the AP Physics C electricity and magnetism exam.
Laptops, cellphones, and tablets are not to be used in lecture, nor should you use the lab computers to read email or surf the web. These devices are highly distracting and substantially weaken the learning experience, not just for a student using one of these devices but for the other members of the class and for the teacher. You are allowed to use your laptops in recitation but I urge you to stay focused on discussing and solving problems with your classmates, there is a limited amount of time for you to prepare for each weekly quiz.
Various announcements related to the course will be posted on the course Piazza webpage. Piazza is an elegant web-based way for the instructors and class to share information and to help each other out. For example, if you have a question about the course ("What do I do if one of the books in the bookstore is not yet available?" or "What will be on this week's quiz?" or "I didn't understand one of the arguments given in class, here is where I am confused...", or "I am stuck on Problem 3, how do I get started?"), please post your question on Piazza so that other students, the TA, or myself can provide suggestions or comments. Anonymous posting on Piazza is allowed and do feel free to post anonymously if that will make you comfortable in asking a question.
I do make one strict request regarding Piazza, which is please do not post detailed solutions to any homework problem. This will short circuit the creative process of figuring out how to solve the problem, which is an essential part of learning how to do physics.
For the assigned reading, you should
The different course components have the following weighting and are explained further below:
| Component | Percent of Total Grade |
| Final exam | 30% |
| Midterm exam | 20% |
| Weekly quizzes | 30% |
| Lab reports | 10% |
| Homework assignments | 5% |
| Class participation for clicker questions | 5% |
These exams will be closed-book. The midterm will cover all material up to the date of the exam, the final exam will cover material over the entire semester, although with a greater emphasis on the material discussed after the midterm (probably 70% after, 30% earlier). Questions will be based on examples discussed in class, on examples discussed in the text, on quiz problems, on homework problems, and on concepts, strategies, and techniques learned in the labs. All relevant equations and data will be provided with the exams so you will not need to memorize such information. Instead, your goal during these exam will be to demonstrate your conceptual and technical understanding of key topics.
Most recitations will end with an in-class closed-book 25-minute quiz consisting of some true/false questions, some multiple-choice questions, and some questions that require writing in the form of calculation or verbal explanation. The quizzes are not cumulative, they will emphasize material discussed since the previous quiz, and will occasionally include questions about the most recent lab.
Your lowest two quiz grades will automatically be dropped before determining the total quiz grade for the semester. Because of this policy, you do not need an excuse or permission to skip a recitation, for example if you are out of town because of some Duke or family event. However, you should try to take all the quizzes since they will help you to understand and to appreciate the material.
There will be approximately ten quizzes over the semester so each quiz will contribute about 3% of your overall grade. This means that you should not feel stress for any of the quizzes; even flunking a quiz or two will have a minor effect on your overall grade. Instead, you should view the weekly quizzes as a valuable opportunity for you to determine how well you are understanding the course material.
Information about how to complete lab reports and the policy concerning late and missed lab work will be provided during your first day of lab, with some information posted on the Physics 162 Sakai webpage under the Resources link (on the left side of the 162 Sakai webpage). The teaching assistant, physics graduate student Ms. Marcoux, will be grading your lab reports so any questions about lab grading should go first to her. Students will work in groups and produce one lab report per group, and all members of a group will get the same grade. Groups will have one week after their lab to submit their lab report. Each lab report should be written by a different member of the group, with the author being denoted by an asterisk * at the beginning of the report.
The same comments given below for completing homework assignments apply to labs, for example about writing clearly, defining all symbols the first time they are used, giving physical units for all physical quantities, labeling graphs, and using an appropriate number of significant digits. One extra requirement will be to give error bars of data points in plots.
The lowest lab report grade will be dropped before determining your final course grade.
There will be a homework assignment about once per week and due at the beginning of Friday's class. (This is to discourage students from skipping class to complete an assignment.) Having the assignment due on Friday will allow you to work on the homework problems in Wednesday's recitation with other members of the class and with the professor or TA before the assignment is due.
Assignments are intended to take from four to six hours per week to complete (not including reading the text). If an assignment takes more than six hours, something has gone wrong so please post a message on Piazza that the assignment is too long (you can do so anonymously if you like). Prof. Greenside can then email the class about how to reduce the duration of the assignment, e.g., by dropping parts of a problem or an entire problem.
The homework problems and labs are the most important parts of Physics 162, this is where you develop and sharpen your physics intuition and problem solving skills. Since assignments can take up to six hours to complete, it is a bad idea to start and try to complete an assignment the night before it is due, that will not give you enough time to think about the problems in a creative and constructive way. So please start working on each assignment a few days before it is due, especially before the Wednesday recitation. Starting early will give you time to meet with me, with the TA, or with your classmates if you need some help.
The two lowest homework grades will be automatically dropped before determining your final homework grade for the semester. Either don't do one of the assignments or just let your lowest homework grade be automatically ignored. This also means that you don't have to ask permission or get an excuse to skip an assignment, e.g., if you are traveling out of town because of a Duke or family event.
Because of the policy of dropping the two lowest homework grades, late homeworks are not accepted, with no exceptions. Please be familiar with the information on the Duke webpage about Class Attendance and Missed Work.
Only one or two homework problems will be graded for each assignment, since it will not be practical for the grader to grade all the problems of all the students. Although not all problems will be graded, you should figure out how to solve all the problems so that you will be prepared for the weekly quiz and for the midterm and final exams. Detailed answers will be posted for each assignment after its due date, and I encourage you to work through the solutions and to compare them with how you solved the problem.
You are not allowed to get homework answers from other students or from the Internet where complete solution for almost any undergraduate text can be found. This will be regarded as cheating which has serious consequences at Duke. In turn, you are not allowed to give complete answers to your classmates (including not posting solutions on Piazza). If a classmate asks for help, give a hint about what to do. You will learn much more if you struggle creatively to solve the problems on your own or by discussing them with your classmates or with the TA or with myself. Also keep in mind that 80% of your course grade will be based on quizzes, the midterm, and final exam for which you will not have access to your textbook to the Internet, to a computer, or to your classmates.
You are allowed to collaborate with your classmates on an assignment, and I officially encourage collaboration. (This is realistic, scientists collaborate all the time in research.) However, you must write up your homework on your own, in your own words, and with your own understanding. Please also acknowledge explicitly at the beginning of your homework anyone who gave you substantial help, e.g. classmates or the TA or myself. (Again, scientists usually acknowledge in their published articles colleagues that helped in completing some particular research.) Failure to write your homeworks in your own words or failure to acknowledge help when given may lead to severe academic penalties so please play by the rules.
When writing up your assignments, please be clear and demonstrate insight. Writing clearly means using readable handwriting (no tiny or crowded script) and presenting your thoughts logically. You should strive to use proper grammar, correct spelling, and good sentence structure. For questions that require a mathematical answer, show your work clearly. Use plenty of space between symbols, and use blank lines to separate successive lines of equations. Keep in mind that paper is cheap compared to the time for you to solve and write up your answers, and compared to the time for the TA and myself to read and grade your homeworks. You will get partial or no credit if the TA or myself can not easily understand your answers.
Demonstrating insight means using complete sentences or detailed phrases that explain what you are doing and why. Cryptic brief answers like "yes", "no", or "4π" will not be given credit. Your written answers must show that you understand how you got your answer and that you appreciate the significance of your answer. A simple criterion for a well-written answer is that you will be able to understand the answer yourself several weeks after you have written your answer, even without remembering what the original question was. Writing clearly especially pays off when it comes time for you to review your assignments in preparation for the quizzes, midterm and final exam. Writing clearly is also one of the most valuable skills you can develop at Duke.
When writing your homework assignments, please pay attention to details. All symbols should be given names the first time you introduce them. For example, you should say "the magnetic field strength B" or "the angle θ" instead of just using the symbols B and θ. Physical units should be given for any numerical answer that corresponds to a physical quantity. For example, you should say "the distance was d=0.02 km", "the angle was a=5.3 radians", or "the magnetic field strength B had the value 2.3 T". Graphs should be carefully drawn and have their axes clearly labeled, and you should give the symbols and physical units of quantities associated with the horizontal and vertical axes.
Numbers obtained from a calculator or from a computer mathematics program like Mathematica should be rounded to the appropriate number of significant digits. For this course, two or fewer digits will suffice for most answers, and in some cases you will only be required to estimate a magnitude to the nearest power of ten (no significant digits). Thus if you obtain a final answer 7.48752103E-03 by combining numbers such that one of the numbers had only two significant digits, you should write this answer in your homework, quiz, or exam as 7.5×10-3. Excessive significant digits will lead to points being taken off on homeworks, quizzes, lab reports, and exams.
Discussion and answering of questions during class via the iclickers is an important pedagogical part of the course and so part of your grade depends on your attending class and in answering the questions. The grade for this part of the course is binary: if you answer at least 75% of the interactive questions over the semester, you get an A for this part of the course, otherwise you get an F. It does not matter if you answer the questions correctly or not, just that you are participating in the class.
Note that you will register your iclicker+ electronically early on in the semester and so your answers will be associated with your name. Also, answering 75% of the questions allows you considerable freedom to miss several classes without penalizing this part of your grade.
If you are in the Physics building, you can also drop by my office Physics 097, I would enjoy the chance to talk with you.
There are several ways to get help in this course:
| Jan 9, Wed | First class, no recitation, no labs this week. | |
| Jan 21, Mon | No class, Martin Luther King, Jr. day | |
| Jan 23, Wed | Drop/Add ends at 5 PM | |
| Mar 6, Wed | Midterm exam during recitation 1:15-3:15 pm; lecture that day is optional and for review | |
| Mar 11-15 | No classes, spring break | |
| Apr 24, Wed | Last 162 class of the semester | |
| Apr 25-28 | Undergraduate reading period | |
| May 3, Fri | Final exam, 7-10 PM |
A list of topics by dates is given on the 162-course schedule webpage.
For those of you want to see more worked examples and somewhat more advanced end-of-chapter problems, see the book Physics for Scientists & Engineers, 4th Edition by Douglas Giancoli, a copy of which will also be on reserve.
There is also a growing number of free high-quality online physics video lectures and physics references. Some examples are:
