Slides for Tuesday's lecture

Here are the slides I used during Tuesday's lecture on waves, which we'll finish up on Wednesday.

I will spell out what material related to waves will be on the last exam, but much of what we're covering is just for 'fun' because it is neat, very much a part of everyday life, and a lot of stuff you may not have noticed before. (Wait until we talk about whispering galleries.)

There is a huge tie-in with music/acoustics which we'll just touch on, and if you take PH102 later this summer we'll learn how audio electronics work. Turns out things like speakers, equalizers, and effects pedals are really not all that complicated in principle ... they are expensive for other reasons.

(Shameless plug: I had a few students construct their own amp + distortion pedal in my lab a while back. It was great fun, and they even learned something. Pictured with the guitar is Hunter Adams, who now does something completely different. You may have noticed.)

Lab for Wed 15 June

Here's the lab for tomorrow, verifying the equations we came up with for 1D elastic and inelastic collisions

And you though physics was useless

... finally, putting projectile motion equations to some good use.

Monday's lab is now ready

Here you go. I had originally posted the labs out of order; this lab for Monday is on analyzing the force in an "Atwood's machine," a simple device with two masses and a pulley. We'll go over the analysis in class as an example problem.

Lab 2: falling objects

I've got a draft of the lab 2 procedure up now - we'll analyze the motion of a falling object and learn how to calculate best-fit trendlines (linear regression). I will probably make some minor adjustments before Thursday (complete by Wednesday evening), but the gist of it will remain the same.

If I do make any changes, the link above will remain the same - I'll just replace the file. Please have a read through at least the introduction/background before Thursday's lab session.

Also, here's a nice applet related to linear regression you might find useful in understanding the lab analysis.

Tomorrow's reading

For tomorrow, we'll cover the mathematical aspects of motion in 1D, and just start on 2D motion. The former will cover essentially all of Ch. 2, the latter sections 3.1 and 3.2 of Ch. 3.

I made one small mistake today when we were talking about the graphs at the very end. The plots I was analyzing should have been position versus time, not velocity versus time. The slope at any given point on the position graph is the instantaneous velocity. If we plot velocity verus time, the slope at any given point is the instantaneous acceleration.

As a result, we'll start off tomorrow morning by discussing graphical analysis of motion again, just so you see it correctly, and then move on to the mathematical analysis of motion.

And, one last thing: be sure to read the lab procedure and statistics introduction before tomorrow's lab. Things will go a lot smoother & more quickly if you've read it ahead of time ...

Lab 1: statistics & uncertainty

For Wednesday's lab, we'll learn to count cards.

Actually, we'll use normal and 'stacked' decks to learn about standard deviation and uncertainty, which we'll use throughout the rest of the laboratories. Please read the procedure (which includes in introduction to basic statistics) before Wednesday's lab session. This one is longer than usual ...