| E-M Home Page/ | First Created 1/31/02 |
Introduction |
Once you are familiar with the navigation procedure, you should familiarize yourself with the course Structure. You should understand that the course is structured like a tree, with the more basic concepts located on the lower branches and the more advanced topics on the higher branches.
We strongly recommend that you at least skim each page before you go to its higher pages; otherwise, you are at serious risk of missing the pattern of the forest through seeing too many leaves. Learning the pattern of the forest is the most important part of learning any physics field, whether that knowledge is ever in a test question or not.
By remaining on the lower branches, curious (or beginning) students can explore the fundamental principles without worrying about the mathematics, and serious students can build a firm conceptual foundation before proceeding further up the tree. By climbing higher and higher into the tree, students can obtain an ever-increasing level of comprehension of the subject.
In principle, this tree of knowledge could extend without limit to higher and higher levels of understanding, or at least until it merges into the literature expressing current research. So, to limit the amount of material in the course, the upper branches of our tree have been trimmed. We hope the amount of trimming is appropriate for a three-semester-hour college physics course with some optional material added to allow for course flexibility and student curiosity. (If it isn't now, it should be better after a few iterations of teaching with it and improving it.)
Even classical physics requires students to cast aside many of their pre-conceived notions of how the world operates in order to grasp the true nature of the universe. For example, most people grow up thinking, based on their experience, that a force is required to keep an object moving in a straight line at constant speed. But classical physics takes the exact opposite viewpoint. It asserts that a force is required to prevent an object from moving in a straight line at constant speed. As a result, classical physics often challenges the common sense notions of many students. Perhaps this is one reason so many students find classical physics such a difficult subject to master.
What is true for classical physics is even truer for modern physics. If classical physics defies, or at least stretches, our common sense, modern physics pushes our imagination to the limit. It demonstrates that the world around us is considerably stranger than it first appears. As we look below the surface of classical physics we find an absolutely amazing sub-structure to the universe that often requires us to adopt a completely new and different view of reality.
For example, contrary to the common conception that we live in a time-varying three-dimensional universe, special relativity argues that we actually exist in a four-dimensional reality. Contrary to the obvious appearance that space is flat, general relativity asserts that it is really curved. Contrary to our intuitive notion that particles and waves are fundamentally different, quantum mechanics shows that they are really two aspects of the same thing. And contrary to the logical conclusion that any two objects can, at least in principle, be distinguished from one another, statistical quantum physics demonstrates that certain fundamental particles in nature are absolutely indistinguishable -- so much so that even God cannot tell them apart.
If you really mastered every element presented in your first-year physics text (not just those that got enough lecture time to be likely to be on the test), then this semester should have few new concepts and perhaps very little news overall. What this course will cover is the details of electrical and magnetic phenomena. Your first course gave you the basics, but it limited itself to simple situations: a few isolated point charges, or a simple, usually symmetric, charge distribution, for instance. In this course we will deal with general configurations, and especially with what the properties of realistic materials do to modify the handling of the same laws.
Even this course won't cover nearly everything; a real mastery at this level will call for a second semester, and even more can be said using mathematical tools that a graduate student should either have or be acquiring.
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This page adapted with permission from the similar page
constructed by Dr. Lionel D. Hewett for his course
Modern
Physics 1.