Syllabus: (PDF)
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Dr. Larsen's Main Page
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- WELCOME! -
This is the web-page for Classical Mechanics. If you're on this webpage, it is probably reasonable to figure that you are likely enrolled in the class -- so thanks for signing up. Materials on this webpage are meant to supplement information given to you in class itself. I'm not a big fan of OAKS, therefore any on-line supplementary material for the course you need can be found here. To the left, you'll find important links/syllabi/etc.If you'd like to find out more about me or the research we do in my lab, check out my main webpage.
- About This Course -
This course is an extension of the introduction to Classical Mechanics received in PHYS 111. We will be discussing Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian mechanics of rigid bodies. The course will be taught at the intermediate undergraduate level, though we will move rapidly through the material. (At most institutions, mechanics is a two semester sequence; here we only regularly offer Mechanics 1 -- so efforts will be made to introduce most of the important topics that are considered necessary to prepare you for graduate work in mechanics).As of today, the plan/goal is to cover most of the first 13 chapters of your text. We likely will skip much of chapter 1, we might not do much from chapter 8 or 12, and we might not do the last few chapters in the exact same order as the text. We'll see how things go as we progress through the semester.
I know mechanics sometimes gets the reputation of being "dry" or "boring". I honestly don't think it is, and I hope that you'll agree with me that it is pretty cool by the end of the semester. We're going to be doing some really interesting stuff this semester and -- just like pretty much every one of our upper-level courses -- there will be moments where your mind gets blown.
The cool thing about mechanics that isn't necessarily true in all of your other upper-level courses is that the material is very accessible. We'll be talking about projectiles and springs and pendula and things sliding past each other -- all very physical and accessible ideas.
The fact that we're dealing almost exclusively with physical and accessible ideas is also the crappy thing about classical mechanics. Since the stuff we're talking about exists in our everyday lives, we all have some intuition from your everyday experiences -- but sometimes those intuitions will be wrong. (This has a tendency to happen when we use common words in their scientific contexts -- momentum, force, torque all have very specific meanings and definitions in a scientific context that do not always adhere perfectly to popular usage.) Fortunately, since most of the phenomena we're talking about occur on scales we have access to, we can actually test our ideas in a pretty straightforward way -- just set up the system we're debating about and study it. (This is a huge advantage we have here over courses like quantum mechanics where evidence for the validity of an idea is often indirect.)
- Course Announcements -
FINAL EXAM: Saturday, May 3rd, 2014 from 8-11 AM in RHSC 126.
