Professor - Physics Department
Office: Physics Research Building (PRB), 3 Cummington St., room 551. Telephone: 617-353-9058.
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Professor - Physics Department Office: Physics Research Building (PRB), 3 Cummington St., room 551. Telephone: 617-353-9058. |
Lecture notes, software and other materials for the course are distributed through a shared file system, on a server accessible to the students, in the CAS workstation classroom. No spscific textbook is required for the course.
A program for the simulation and visualization of the evolution of the quantum mechanical wave-function in one dimension, from the course material, can be downloaded here, as a compressed tar archive.
Please consult the syllabus for detailed information about lectures, exams, grading and many other metters related to the course.
Course textbook: Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems by Stephen T. Thornton, Jerry B. Marion, Cengage, 2004.
Goal of this course is to present a theoretically based formulation
of classical mechanics at a level that is intermediate between
the level of an introductory undergraduate course and the level
of a graduate course.
Lecture notes and assignments will posted on this web site.
Lecture notes:
Lecture 1: Vectors and matrices.
Review of Newton's laws: see PY251-Lecture 3
Review of kinetic and potential energy: see
PY251-Lecture 4
Review of linear momentum and center of mass: see
PY251-Lecture 5
Lecture 2: The Lagrangian formalism.
Lecture 3: Applications of Lagrange's equations.
Code and linux makefile
for the simulation of the double pendulum.
Code for the same problem based on the more
accurate Runge-Kutta algorithm.
Lecture 4: Hamiltonian dynamics.
Lecture 5: The equation of Hamilton-Jacobi and problems of optimization:
part1,
part2.
Notes on the equation of Hamilton Jacobi:
from PY 421.
Lecture 6: Small oscillations.
Lecture 7: Summary notes on the dynamics
of rigid bodies.
Lecture 8:
Dynamics of continuous systems.
Assignments:
Assignment 1 with solutions.
Assignment 2 with solutions.
Assignment 3 with solutions.
Assignment 4 with solutions.
Assignment 5 with solutions.
Assignment 6 with solutions.
Assignment 7 with solutions.
Assignment 8 with solutions.
Assignment 9 with solutions.
First midterm exam with solutions.
Second midterm exam with solutions.
Final exam with solutions.
Course textbook:
Physics for Scientists and Engineers
by Paul Fishbane, Stephen Gasiorowicz, Steve Thornton,
Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005.
Textbook for error analysis in laboratory assignments: Introduction to Error
Analysis by John Taylor, University Science Books, 1997.
This course is calculus based and students taking the course
should have already taken calculus. Students should check their
knowledge of calculus by doing the
Mathematics self-test.
Lecture notes for this course are posted on this web site.
Lecture notes:
Lecture 1
Lecture 2
Lecture 3
Lecture 4
Lecture 5
Lecture 6
Lecture 7
Lecture 8
Lecture 9
Lecture 10
Lecture 11
Lecture 12