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- Extra Office Hours for final exam studying Wed, Dec 12, 8 pm
Thursday, Dec 13 3:00 - 5:00 pm Loomis 464 Arka Banerjee Thursday, Dec 13 5:00 - 7:00 pm Loomis 464 Naomi Makins Friday, Dec 14 5:00 - 7:00 pm Loomis 464 Kevin Roberts
- Homework 12 and Final Exam Date posted Wed, Nov 21, 8 pm
- The date and time for the final exam is now known and posted on the homework page:
Saturday, Dec 15, 7:00 - 10:00 pm, Loomis 141The final will cover both halves of the course, with the first part (units 1 - 7) getting about a third of the weight. Past exams and solutions are on the Homework page, as for the midterm. FYI: the registrar maintains a page with all final exam info on campus, very useful. Please note that no conflict exam is scheduled for 225. A full description of the byzantine conflict-exam rules is provided below, do have a look. Note in particular the max-2-in-24hr rule (know your rights!)
- Homework 7 solution posted
- ... and one more post: the homework 7 Relativity Summary Page from Monday's lecture.
- Special Relativity Summary & Homework 7 solutions posted
- Here is the Special Relativity Summary Page from Monday's lecture. It is also posted on the Homework \& Exams page (at the top), as is the solution to Homework 7.
- Extra Office Hours Thu, Oct 18, 3 pm
- Today (Thursday) and tomorrow (Friday), we will be available in Loomis 464 from 5 pm - 7 pm to answer any questions you have while preparing for the midterm exam.
- Homework solutions up, Midterm Exam coming up Tue, Sep 10, 5 am
- The Homework & Exams page is now updated with homework solutions, and the old midterm exams and solutions posted there are now accessible (server problem fixed). Please note that, since we are accepting late homework for a week after the due date (with the cumulative 15% / weekday penalty of course), the homework solutions can't appear until a week after the due date. Happily, this coincides with when you get your homeworks back, in discussion.
Since the midterm exam is coming up in two weeks, now would be a good time to start reviewing and practicing. The midterm will cover weeks 1 - 7 of the course (special relativity plus associated math), so review all your units, lecture notes, homework assignments and solutions from that period. You will be surprised at how much insight you gain when you perform such a review: you'll notice details and perceive a structure to the material that you didn't see the first time around. It is always so: it takes several passes through a subject, with time and other learning in between, to truly ``get it all''. Exams actually provide a pretty helpful mechanism to make one run through everything again ... and once again for the final.
Practice is the other part of studying. The old midterms provide a large pool of practice questions, so work through as many as you can. Just remember: always work the problem before you look at the solution. Reading a solution before you wrestle with the problem is useless: the solution will make sense and you'll think you're good to go ... but can you reproduce it from scratch in a different context? What helps enormously is the reverse: wrestle with the problem, then look at the solution, and you will see exactly where you got stuck, or discover a tactic you didn't think of. That's the way to practice!
- Homework 1 updated Sun, Sep 2, 10 pm
- Thanks to discussions with the Sunday office hours folks, I added some more clarification to questions 2(a) and 3(c); the updated version is now posted.
FYI: Sunday-night homework tweaks are a 225 tradition and another benefit of early office hours. A big thank you to the Sunday folks, both today and in future, for your feedback and discussions, they help make the homework as clear and helpful as possible!
- Website is up, including homework 1 and office hours Fri, Aug 31, 2012
- The website is up at last, on its brand new server. Please take two minutes to read through the general course information on this page. Some specific points:
- Homework 1 is posted on the Homework & Exams page. Homework is due every Thursday at 11 am and must be dropped off in the Phys 225 homework box on the second floor of Loomis. (It's on the north side, in the corridor between Loomis and MRL).
- Please look at the office hours posted below. Important: if you cannot make any of these times due to your class schedule, please send me an email right away and include all the times on Mondays through Wednesdays that you are free. (We will add on more office hours if we have to in order to accomodate everyone.) I also encourage everyone to make use of the Sunday office hours: working on homework before Monday will make enhance the benefit of the lectures, as you will already have wrestled with the material. (This is the concept behind the Phys 21X preflights, we're just not enforcing it.)
- Office hours
Sunday afternoon 2:00 - 4:00 pm Loomis 464 Naomi Makins Tuesday afternoon 3:00 - 5:00 pm Loomis 35 (basement) Arka Banerjee Wednesday evening 5:00 - 7:00 pm Loomis 464 Kevin Roberts
- Lecture Time and Location
- Mondays from 4:00 pm - 4:50 pm in Loomis 141
- Instructors
- Prof. Naomi C.R. Makins ( makins at illinois.edu or
much better, call me at 333-7291), Loomis 463
- Arka Banerjee ( abanerj6 at illinois.edu )
- Kevin J. Roberts ( krobert7 at illinois.edu )
- Graders
- Pak On Chan ( pchan9 at illinois.edu )
- Ye Zhuang ( yzhuang6 at illinois.edu )
- Mao-Chuang Yeh ( myeh2 at illinois.edu )
- Recommended Text Books (on reserve at Grainger)
- There is no required book for this course, but a textbook is often very helpful to provide a different point of view and additional detail. Here are my recommendations:
- "Special Relativity" by A. P. French
This book is excellent for its historical presentation of Special Relativity. The development of this theory is a fascinating story; we won't talk about history in 225 so do pick up this book if you are interested. Note that the Copyright is 1968 so there will be used copies available, possibly at considerably lower prices than new books.- "Spacetime Physics" by Taylor and Wheeler.
Every book written by Taylor and Wheeler is filled with physical insight. The presentation is very ``talky'', with vastly more words than math. The style is not to everyone's taste but you will find extended discussions of the physical consequences of Special Relativity and its apparent paradoxes. The book also contains many worked examples.- "Basic Training in Mathematics: A Fitness Program for Science Students", (Paperback) by R. Shankar.
I'm not wild-crazy about this book but it definitely has some great content. More to the point, it's the only text on mathematical physics I could find that meets these two criteria: it's at a freshman/sophomore level, and it's recent enough that it uses modern notation.
- Course Grading
- Your grade in this course will be based on successful completion of the weekly homework assignments (35%), participation in the Discussion Sessions (10%), performance on a mid-term exam (15%), and performance on the final exam (40%).
- Late Policy for Attendance at Discussion Sessions
- If you're 8 minutes or more late, you will receive only half credit for that week; if you are 15 minutes or more late you get zero credit.
- Homework due dates and time
- Homework is due at 11 am on Thursdays. Your solutions are to be deposited in the course homework box that is located on the second floor of Loomis Lab, at the entrance to the overpass to the Materials Research Lab (MRL) on the north side. The homework boxes are painted bright yellow; you can't miss them unless you are totally absorbed with texting or Angry Birds.
- Late Policy for Homework
- If you don't make the deadline, you lose 15% of your grade for each weekday that your homework is late. The graders check the homework box each day at 11 am; anything turned in after that time will belong to the following day's submissions. You cannot get any credit for homework that is more than six days late.
- Conflict Exam Rules
- Physics 225 does not schedule conflict exam sittings. For final exams, the rules concerning conflicts are outlined in points (5) and (6) of the Student Code - Final Exam section. Point (5) describes the important max-2-in-24hr rule: no student can be required to take three exams in a 24 hour period. Please read this important rule so you know your rights! There is a strict order of precedence that determines which courses have to offer you a conflict exam if you have a scheduling collision (including the 2-in-24 rule). As Phys 225 runs a "non-combined" final and has a relatively small number of students compared with many other 1st or 2nd year classes, it is first in this order, i.e. you will take the conflict exam for your larger classes. If you have a final exam scheduling collision which is not resolved by these rules (e.g. two smaller / "non-combined" courses that collide), email the instructors from all of the courses involved at the same time so that they can work out among themselves who will give you a conflict sitting.