Physics 162 Previous Announcements
Spring, 2012

• Today's lecture notes about interference can be downloaded here. You should also look over the slides for today's class which has some further information and some clicker questions related to interference.

• Today's recitation is optional and there is no quiz. I will be in Room 150 from 1:15-3:15pm

Monday, April 22

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here. They discuss a worked example of radiation pressure and some material on polarization of light.

• Assignment 13, the last assignment, can be downloaded here. It is due Thursday evening, just put the assignment in the 162 box for your lab reports for Victor to pick up.

Sunday, April 21

• Please come to class this Monday so you can fill out course evaluations for Physics 162.

• Reading:
  1. Read Sections 22.1-22.4 on the wave model of light and interference of light waves. We will focus mainly on how light or sound passing through a screen with one or two slits can be used to prove that these are phenomena arising from interference of waves.

  2. You will likely find it useful to also do some reviewing by reading Sections 20.1-20.4 on waves, and section 20.6 on power and intensity, and Section 21.5-21.7 on interference in one and two dimensions.

  3. A few miscellaneous sections of Knight can provide some insight about the quantum properties of light, look at Sections 37.1, 38.3 and 39.1.

  4. Watch this video "Probability and Uncertainty--The Quantum Mechanical View of Nature" by the physicist Richard Feynman. The video looks at the light and electrons passing through a two-slit barrier to illustrate the profound difference in classical physics (waves interfering) and quantum mechanics. I encourage you to look Feynman's other Cornell lectures, which can be found here. (And look at the 1965 Cornell undergraduates in the audience, to get a sense of how fashions have changed over nearly 30 years!).

Wednesday, April 17

• Files to download:
  • Today's lecture notes.

  • Assignment 12

  • Solutions to Assignment 11

• Reading: All of Chapter 34 "Electromagnetic Fields and Waves" of Knight 3e. If we have time before the semester ends, we will also discuss parts of Chapter 22, "Wave Optics", especially the phenomena of interference and diffraction, and also some quantum properties of light and how these differ from predictions of the classical (non-quantum) Maxwell equations.

  Since we will be discussing traveling wave solutions of Maxwell's equations representing light, I strongly encourage you to review Chapter 20 of the Knight book on "Traveling Waves" so are comfortable with basic concepts like wave number, wave speed, and expressions of the form Asin(kx - ωt + φ).

• Topics covered on Wednesday's quiz (last quiz)
  • How to work with complex numbers, e.g. go back and forth between standard and polar form, how to calculate magnitudes of products and ratios of complex numbers.
  • How to use complex amplitudes to compute non-transient properties of single-loop AC circuits containing resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Problems 1, 2, 3 and 5 of Assignment 11 are especially important to understand but other topics you need to know are:
    • What is a high-pass, low-pass, and band filter and how to create such filters using RC or similar circuits. (This is covered in my lecture notes, was discussed in lecture, and is discussed in the Knight text.)
    • How a RLC circuit acts like a resonant filter that selects a narrow range of frequencies of input currents.
    • How the current and voltage drop across a circuit element in an AC circuit can be out of phase.
    • How to calculate the average power consumed by an AC circuit, including what is meant by the rms value of a signal.
  • Relativity of magnetic and electric fields at the level of Knight's book (Sections 34.1) and of the clicker questions discussed in Monday's lecture.

Monday, April 15

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here.

• Reading: All of Chapter 34 "Electromagnetic Fields and Waves" of Knight 3e. If we have time before the semester ends, we will also discuss parts of Chapter 22, "Wave Optics", especially the phenomena of interference and diffraction, and also some quantum properties of light and how these differ from predictions of the classical (non-quantum) Maxwell equations.

  Since we will be discussing traveling wave solutions of Maxwell's equations representing light, I strongly encourage you to review Chapter 20 of the Knight book on "Traveling Waves" so are comfortable with basic concepts like wave number, wave speed, and expressions of the form Asin(kx - ωt + φ).

• Sun Slings Largest Solar Flare Yet: Coronal Mass Ejection Hurtles to Earth, Science World Report about a highly practical aspect of moving charges, how plasma hurled at Earth via a solar flare can cause large electrical surges (via Faraday's law) that can knockout power grids and shutdown communication satellites, GPS satellites, etc. This raises multiple questions about how to design electrical devices to be immune to these electrical pulses from the Sun.

Friday, April 12

• Reading: All of Chapter 34 "Electromagnetic Fields and Waves" of Knight 3e. If we have time before the semester ends, we will also discuss parts of Chapter 22, "Wave Optics", especially the phenomena of interference and diffraction, and also some quantum properties of light and how these differ from predictions of the classical (non-quantum) Maxwell equations.

• Solutions to Assignment 10 can be downloaded here.

• There will be no recitation or quiz on the last day of classes, Wednesday April 24. Instead, the period 1:15-3:15 pm will be a help session during which you can come by my office to ask questions about course material.

• MIT Researchers Fire Up the Ionic Thrusters, Business Week article.

Wednesday, April 10

• You can download today's lecture notes here.

Tuesday, April 9

• There is a required tour of Duke's Free Electron Laser lab this Wednesday during the first hour of recitation (1:15-2:15pm). Please meet directly in the lobby of the Free Electron Laser building (about a 2-minute walk behind the Physics building) at 1:15pm, do not meet directly in the recitation room.

• New files are available to download:
  1. Assignment 11

  2. Monday's lecture notes.

  3. Solutions to Assignment 9
     Note: these solutions are not quite complete (there wasn't time for the grader to write up all the details) but should suffice for you to understand how to solve the problems.

  4. Solutions to Quiz 8.

• Reading:
  • For this Monday and Wednesday, in addition to reading my online lecture notes, finish reading the Chapter 35 of the Knight 3e book on "AC Circuits", and also read Chapter 8 ("Alternating-Current Circuits") of the book "Electricity and Magnetism" by E. Purcell and D. Morin. You can download a scan of this chapter by going to the Sakai 162 webpage, then click "Resources" to find and download the file "purcell-morin-chapter-8-alternating-current-circuits.pdf". The end of the file also includes solutions to the problems at the back of the chapter (but not to the exercises).

  • For Friday's class and for next week, please next start reading Chapter 34 of Knight 3e, "Electromagnetic Fields and Waves".

    Note: we will be referring several times to the Einstein's theory of special relativity. If you have not see any special relativity before, you may need to do some supplementary reading in Chapter 36 of the Knight 3e book.

Friday, April 5

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here.

• Reading: in addition to Knight Chapter 35 on "AC Circuits", please read Chapter 8 ("Alternating-Current Circuits") of the book "Electricity and Magnetism" by E. Purcell and D. Morin. You can download a scan of this chapter by going to the Sakai 162 webpage, then click "Resources" to find and download the file "Purcell-Morin-Chapter-8-Alternating-current-circuits.pdf".

  This chapter uses complex numbers to study AC circuits at just the right level for the next few lectures so is the better resource to rely on for this part of the course.

  You may also look enjoy browsing through the Purcell-Morin book on your own. This third edition has many worked examples that are a bit more challenging than the Knight book and so just right for the 162 course, and the book is used in some honors intro physics courses at places like Harvard, Cornell, and MIT. We will refer to this book one more time when we discuss the connection of special relativity to electricity and magnetism. Note: there is an electronic second edition of this book available online through the Duke library. While useful for reading about AC circuits, the second edition lacks the many worked out problems that coauthor David Morin added to the third edition.

Wednesday, April 3

• Please download here a corrected version of Assignment 10, the figure for problem 4 has been replaced with the right one, a new part to the Complex Numbers Bootcamp was added (part (e)), and an additional challenge problem was added.

  Also, please finish Problem 7 of Assignment 10, the "Bootcamp on Complex Numbers" before Friday so that you will be ready to appreciate our discussion using complex numbers to analyze AC circuits.

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here.

• Positrons Galore, article about the latest results of a high precision experiment in outer space to measure the number of positrons striking the Earth. The article should be of interest to 162 students for several reasons: the excess of positrons detected may be a first successful detection of the mysterious dark matter, and the tools used to analyze the positrons are all ideas and technologies we have been discussing in 162 such as measuring how particles move through a strong magnetic field to measure their charge-to-mass ratio, which helps to classify the particle.

Tuesday, April 2

• As was the case last week, today's quiz will be given at the beginning of recitation at 1:15pm so please come a few minutes early and spread out in preparation. I will set some time aside in Wednesday's lecture to answer any questions you have on the quiz material.

• Assignment 10 can be downloaded here.

  Do not be put off by the length of the assignment, much of it is a guided tutorial on complex numbers that involves many short steps that will take you little time to solve.

  It is important that you get up to speed with complex numbers as fast as possible so please do Problem 7 of Assignment 10 (the "Bootcamp" on complex numbers) as soon as possible, preferably by this Friday's lecture.

• Reading: Finish reading Sections 33.8-33.10 on inductors and uses of inductors on circuits, and then start reading Sections 35.1-35.3 in preparation for Friday's lecture.

  You will need to rely more heavily on my lecture notes as we discuss Chapter 35 on "AC Circuits" since we will be deviating substantially from the Knight book by using complex numbers rather than phasors to carry out the various calculations. The two approaches are similar (phasors are a less technical way to describe what one is doing using complex numbers) and give the same results, but working with complex numbers will prepare you better for the Modern Physics course and for other physics and engineering courses, and I hope will prove interesting to you in its own right.

Monday, April 1

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here.

• Solutions for Quiz 7 have been posted here. If you didn't pick up your quiz in class, you can pick it up outside my office.

Sunday March 31

• Please remember to email your clicker 8-character code to Cate so we can give you credit for your clicker responses.

• Some recent science news articles of relevance to the class:
  • Physics Focus article about a recent attempt to find magnetic monopoles in the Earth's crust, by studying the pattern of currents generated as particles pass through a particular kind of conducting loop called a SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device), the most sensitive device known for detecting weak magnetic fields.

  • This article on the magnetic moment of antiproton should help to convince you why an understanding of magnetic moments is worthwhile. Theory predicts that antiparticles like positrons or antiprotons should have exactly the same magnetic moment but with an an opposite direction compared to its non-anti-particle, but it is of course important to test the truth of this directly, as accurately as possible. It is only fairly recently that scientists can gather and study isolated antiprotons generated at the Large Hadron Collider. Any difference in the magnetic moment magnitude between a proton and antiproton would be a rather profound physics discovery since it would represent a significant error in the Standard Model of particle physics, our best description to date of the properties of subatomic particles.

Friday, March 29

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here.

• I will hold a help session this Sunday from 4-5pm in Physics 298.

Wednesday, March 27

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here. They have several worked examples that might be useful for today's quiz.

  This webpage is a simple example of how to create a demo of magnetohydrodnamic propulsion. If this intrigues you, Derek in the demo room can help you get the parts to make one, or even a real engine for a small toy boat that can drive around in salt water.

• Assignment 9 is now available and can be downloaded here.

• Reading: Sections 33.1-33.7 for this week, Sections 33.8-33.10 for Monday of next week. Note: after Chapter 33, we will have one lecture on relativity of E and B fields, then go to Chapter 35 on AC circuits, then go back to Chapter 34 on Maxwell's equations.

Tuesday, March 26

• New files to download
  • Monday's lecture notes (3/25/2013).

  • Solutions to Assignment 8.

  • From the course Sakai website under Resources/"Knight quick check files", the file quickcheck_32.ppt which gives answers to the recent clicker questions (with one or two exceptions).

• New quiz policy Starting this Wednesday and for future recitations, quizzes will take place right away at 1:15pm and will last no longer than 30 minutes. So please come a few minutes early, put your backpacks aside and spread out, and be ready to take the quiz.

  If you have questions related to the quiz, please ask them during Monday's or Wednesday's lectures or post a question on Piazza.

• Email your clicker code to Cate Please remember to email your 8-character clicker code to Cate (catem117@gmail.com) so we can finish relating your clicker to your class participation.

Sunday, March 24

• Reading: finish reading Sections 32.6-32.9 and start reading Sections 33.1 and 33.2 in preparation for Monday's class as we start our discussion of electromagnetic induction and Faraday's law.

• Solutions to the midterm exam can be downloaded here.

• Friday's lecture notes can be downloaded here. There is a brief discussion on pages 5-6 of the notes why Ampère's law makes sense for static currents: it is a consequence of the fact that the magnetic field strength of a straight wire decreases as 1/d where d is the distance from the wire, and that arc lengths spanning a given angle increase as d so the two effects cancel. The argument is similar to why Gauss's law holds for static charges, the decrease in electric field magnitude with distance as 1/r² cancels the increase in surface area that increases as r².

Wednesday, March 20

• Lectures notes for today's class (Wed, 3/20) can be downloaded here, and lecture notes for Monday's class (3/18) can be downloaded here.

  More generally, you can download lecture notes and lecture slides from the Lecture Files directory.

Tuesday March 19

• Sun Storm Forecast: Tiny Chance of Havoc, New York Times science article about how the world's power grids have a chance of being badly affected by a large solar storm (and how this has happened a few times in the past). This is a nice example for the class of currents and magnetic fields. You will understand the related physics next week, when we discuss electromagnetic induction and Faraday's law, and this Wikipedia article on geomagnetically induced currents describes some of the physics.

Sunday, March 17

• Assignment 8 can be downloaded here and is due on Monday, March 25, at the beginning of class.

• Reading: Sections 32.1-32.6 for Monday's and Wednesday's lectures, and Sections 32.7-32.9 by Friday. We will not cover Section 32.10 in this course but I encourage you to read it on your own, to gain some knowledge of what is understood microscopically about magnetism.

• There will be no quiz for this Wednesday's recitation (March 20). But do come so that I can work out a few extra examples for you and so you can collaborate on the homework problems .

• I have not finished grading the midterms but hope to return them with detailed answers by Wednesday's class on March 20.

Monday, March 4

• Solutions to Assignment 7 can be downloaded here.

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here.

Saturday, March 2

• Lecture notes for Friday, March 1, have been posted here.

• Quiz 6 solutions can be downloaded here. Your graded Quiz 6 (and other graded material) are outside my office so that you can pick them up at your leisure over the weekend. Solutions to Assignment 7 will be posted later on Monday, after you have handed in your assignments, and the grader will try to get your graded Assignment 7 back to you by Tuesday.

• Reading: I appreciate that you will be busy reviewing for the midterm until Wednesday, but we will start discussing Chapter 32 "The Magnetic Field" this coming week in the Monday and Friday lectures. So any reading you can do in this chapter, especially Sections 32.1-32.4, will help you appreciate the lectures.

• Knight quick-check Powerpoint files with answers: I uploaded to the Sakai 162 website Knight "Quick check" Powerpoint files that contain Knight's clicker questions with answers for each of the chapters we have covered so far. The answers are not detailed but should be enough to be useful. If you want more detailed answers than what is available via these files, post a request on Piazza.

  To access these files, go to the Sakai 162 website and click on the "Resources" link in the vertical column on the left side of the webpage. You will see a folder "Knight quick check files" that contains the .ppt files. You will also see a folder "Knight instructor guides" which contains Knight's suggestions to instructors using his book about what kinds of difficulties students might face when learning this material. I make these available to you in the possibility that they help you identify concepts or issues to concentrate on.

• Sunday help session and office hours on Monday and Tuesday Based on the doodle poll (which only four students responded to), I will hold a help session this Sunday in Room 298, from 4:30-6pm but no help session on Saturday. I also created office hours for this coming week
  • 3:30-5:30 pm Monday, March 4
  • 3:30-5:30 pm Tuesday, March 5.
  Just come by my office during that time if you have a question. If more students come by than can fit in my office, I'll find a room for us to talk (likely Room 090, the small seminar room near my office) and I will leave a note on my office door of where to find me.

• The 162 midterm exam will take place this Wednesday, March 6, during recitation, from 1:15-3:15 pm. Please come a few minutes early and clear off everything from your desk except for a pen and pencil (no cellphones, no calculators). Please also spread out as much as possible. The room is unfortunately crowded and I don't want people being tempted to look at each other's exams.

  The exam will cover everything in the course so far including material of Chapter 31 and Assignment 7. Since a two-hour exam can not possibly cover all the material, you should focus on reviewing key concepts and ideas as summarized in each Knight chapter, and especially as emphasized in the quiz and homework problems. The questions on the exam will require

  • using superposition and integration to understand the electric field and electric potential of a continuous charge distribution.
  • using Gauss's law.
  • evaluating a line integral of an electric field, which allows you to calculate the potential difference between two points, or the capacitance between two conductors.
  • solving some multi-loop circuit containing resistors and batteries using Kirchhoff's rules.
  • analyzing some circuit involving multiple capacitors or multiple resistors.
  • understanding the energy stored in capacitors and power dissipated by resistors.
  • understanding properties of metal conductors in electrostatic equilibrium.
  • understanding RC circuits.
  • knowing how to find useful approximations via the first few terms of a Taylor series expansion in some small quantity, for example by using Newton's generalized binomial theorem. You have done this several times, for example to calculate the electric field far from a dipole or to determine the period of oscillation for small motions about some equilibrium arrangement of charges.

  The 10:20 am class on Wednesday morning, March 6, will be an optional help session rather than a lecture (but Monday and Friday of next week will be lectures as we start our discussion of magnetic fields). Come to class if you have any last minute questions about course material.

Thursday, February 28

• Polymer capacitor dazzles flash manufacturer, Physicsworld article about an advance in capacitor design with the implication that future cellphones could have real flash units built in, leading to better pictures. The article brings in several points you are now in a position to appreciate such as energy density of a capacitor, dielectric breakdown field, and the properties of a dielectric.

Wednesday, February 27

• Reading: Finish reading Chapter 31 and read Sections 31.1-32.4 of Chapter 32 "The Magnetic Field" in preparation for the classes of this Friday and Monday.

• Assignment 7 can be downloaded here.

• Solutions to Assignment 6 can be downloaded here.

• Lecture notes for Monday, February 25, can be downloaded here

• Lecture notes for Friday, February 22, can be downloaded here.

• Solutions to Quiz 5 can be downloaded here.

Saturday, February 23

• Bees can sense and learn from the electric fields of flowers, article about recent research that shows that honeybees can sense electric fields of flowers and the significance of that ability.

Friday, February 22

• Reading: Read Sections 31.1-31.5 of Chapter 31 "Fundamentals of Circuits" for today and next week.

  Also look at Section 15.5 of Knight 3e, compare continuity equation for a fluid (associated with mass conservation) with equation for conservation of electron current i_e, in each case you have relation v A = constant, where v is the fluid speed or drift speed, and A is a cross-sectional area of some tube.

Tuesday, February 19

• Assignment 6 can be downloaded here.

Monday, February 18

• Reading: finish reading Chapter 30.

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here.

• Solutions to Assignment 4 can be downloaded here.

• Solutions to Assignment 5 can be download here.

Friday, February 15

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here.

• Reading: finish reading Chapter 29 and read sections 30.1-30.3 of Chapter 30 "Current and Resistance" for Monday's and Wednesday's classes.

Thursday, February 14

• Solutions to Quiz 4 can be downloaded here.

Wednesday, February 13

• Today's lecture notes can be downloaded here.

Tuesday, February 12

• Assignment 5 is available to download here.

Monday, February 11

• Reading: Please read through Chapter 29 for this week. Key topics are how to deduce the electric field from the knowledge of the electric potential V, that conductors are equipotential surfaces with non-uniform surface charge density if not spherical, and various properties of capacitors.

• Files available to download:
  • Solutions to Quiz 3

  • Lecture notes for Monday, February 11.

  • Solutions to Assignment 3 are available to download.

Friday, February 8

• Reading: Please read through Chapter 29. We will cover 29.1-29.4 this Monday, and then spend Wednesday and Friday of next week discussing Sections 29.4-29.7.

• Quiz 3 Solutions can be downloaded here.

• Lecture notes for Friday, Feb 8 can be downloaded here.

• Answers to the one-minute questionnaires:
  1. For February 8, download here.
  2. For February 4 and 6: here.

Monday, February 4

• Homework: Assignment 4 can be downloaded here and is due a week from today.

• Reading: For this week, read all of Chapter 28 and Sections 29.1 and 29.3 (pages 840-842, 844-846 of Knight 3e).
  Some related videos
  • Video of person in Faraday cage in Boston's Museum of Science
  • Video of ArcAttack music group, makes music with modulated sparks, protects themselves with mail suit of armor (Faraday cage).

• Economist article "The future of energy: batteries included?", from the February 2 magazine, about the state of developing cheaper batteries that store more power, an important practical goal for many industrialized nations. This article is overlaps well with Chapters 28 and 29, the theme of which is how energy is related to electric fields, and how electric fields allow one to store and release energy.

Friday, February 1

• Reading: Please read sections 28.1-28.4 of the Knight book on "The Electric Potential" in preparation for next week's classes.

• New files available to download
  1. Solution's to Quiz 2.

  2. Today's lecture notes

• For those of you who did not pick up your homeworks in class today, I put those homeworks in an envelope marked "162" in the journal rack just outside my office so you can pick those up at your leisure.

Wednesday, January 30

• New files to download
  1. Answers to 1-minute questions from January 30.

  2. Assignment 3

  3. Solutions to Assignment 2

  4. Answers to one-minute questions of January 18 and January 25.

  5. Answers to one-minute questions of January 28.

• Reading: please finish reading Chapter 27, read section 28.1 of Chapter 28 ("The Electric Potential") by this Friday, and read sections 28.2-28.4 in preparation for next week's classes.

  A good way to prepare for Wednesday's and Friday's lectures is to try to answer the conceptual questions at the end of Chapter 27. We will begin Chapter 28 towards the end of Friday's lecture.

Monday, January 28

• Recent lecture notes are available to download:
  • Monday, January 28 notes.
  • Friday, January 25 notes.

Friday, January 25

• Reading: please read Sections 27.1-27.3 of Chapter 27 on "Gauss's Law" in preparation for next's weeks classes.

Wednesday, January 23

• Mathematica grade statistics notebook can be downloaded here. This notebook will contain the raw scores, histogram, and method of assigning letter grades for each quiz, for the midterm, and for the final exam. You can use this information to compare how well you are doing compared to the rest of the class.

• Today's lecture notes have been posted and can be downloaded here. These contain more details than Knight and my lecture and should be helpful to some of you in recitation and when solving the current homework problems.

Monday, January 21

• Files available to download
  • Assignment 2 has been posted and can be downloaded here. Note the due date is Monday, January 28, because of the Martin Luther King Jr holiday.

  • Assignment 1 Solutions can be downloaded here. The solutions were written up by Duke undergraduate Physics major Victor Bai, who will also be grading your homeworks this semester.

  • Quiz 1 solutions can be downloaded here.

  • Lecture notes for Friday, January 18 can be downloaded here. From now through the end of the semester, I will be scanning copies of my lectures notes so that you can focus on thinking during class rather than writing notes. The notes will contain key points and some derivations that are not in the textbook, but will not have as much detail as some discussions in class.

• No quiz this Wednesday There will be no quiz in recitation this Wednesday, January 23, since we will not have covered enough new material to make a quiz worthwhile. Instead, I will spend 30-45 minutes of Wednesday's recitation working out some examples to help you prepare for solving the homework problems, and then ask you to work on the homework problems collectively for the remaining time. (Note: don't be tempted to skip recitation just because there is no quiz, you will miss a valuable opportunity to work on the skills needed to solve Chapter 26 problems, and this week's homework assignment is harder than last week's.)

• YouTube video of charged water drops orbiting a charged knitting needle. Check out this video of charged water droplets slowly orbiting an electrically charged knitting needle. By this Friday, you should be able to understand all the details of what is going on.

Friday, January 18

• No class this Monday, it is a Duke and Federal holiday because of Martin Luther King Jr's birthday (which is actually on January 15).

• Reading: please read Sections 26.1 through 26.5 of Chapter 26 "The Electric Field" in preparation for today's and the next two classes. You should finish Chapter 26 by a week from today.

• Clickers: Please bring your clicker to all future classes, starting today (Friday, 1/18).

• Answers to your January 16 one-minute questions can be downloaded here.

• Assignment 2: I will email the class through Piazza when I make the next assignmenet available sometime Saturday morning.

Wednesday, January 16,

• Answers to your January 14 one-minute questions can be downloaded here.

Sunday, January 13

• Answer to Friday's one-minute questionnaires have been posted, you can download them here.

Saturday, January 12

• The first homework assignment has been posted and can be downloaded here. It is due at the beginning of class this coming Friday.

Wednesday, January 9

• Answers to today's 1-minute questionnaires have been posted
  You can download the answers here.

• Reading:
  • Please read pages 719-731 (Sections 25.1 through 25.3 of Chapter 25) of the third edition of the Knight text before the Friday, January 11 lecture, when these ideas will be discussed for the first time. You should then read the remaining part of Chapter 25 (sections 25.4 and 25.5) over the weekend in preparation for the first two lectures of next week.

    As you read the text, please follow the recommendations of the course syllabus by reading actively: take notes, work out example problems in detail (before looking at the solution), and try to make time to think about whether what you are reading makes sense.

• Course announcements:
  • If you were signed up for Physics 162 as of Tuesday, January 8, you should have received an email to join the Physics 162 piazza webpage. If you did not receive such an email, please contact me immediately so I can add your email address to the piazza webpage.

  • The first homework assignment will be posted on Friday, January 11.

  • Please bring your iclicker+ devices to Friday's lecture (assuming they are available for purchase in the bookstore before that date). You should bring your iclicker+ to every class, we will use it most lectures.

  • There is no recitation this week, the first recitation will be on Wednesday, January 16.

  • There are no labs this week, the first labs will take place on Thursday, January 17.

  • There will not be a class on Monday, January 21, because of the Martin Luther King, Jr holiday.

• Recommended seminar
  • Biophysicist Bob Austin of Princeton's Physics Department will be giving a talk Building a Time Machine this Monday, January 14, from 1-2 PM in Room 103 of the Bryan Research Center (not the same as the Bryan Student Center) about his use of microfluidics and other technologies to study how cancer evolves in an accelerated way in response to agents trying to kill cancer. I invite all 162 students to attend his talk as a neat example of applied physics and biophysics.

    I have also arranged for biophysics, physics, and biology majors to meet with Prof. Austin informally from 4-4:45pm in Room 298 of Physics this Monday afternoon. This is a great chance for you to ask all kinds of questions about Prof. Austin's research or about advice he might have for you about what courses to take or research to try.