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| Instructor: Timothy S. Sullivan Office: MAP 206 Email: Sullivan@Kenyon.edu Phone: 427-5830 Class Times: TTh 9:40 - 11:00 AM Office Hours: MWF 11:10AM-12N, Th 4:10-6PM |
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| Required Text: David Griffith's "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics." See the author's web site for corrections to the book . | ||||
Quantum Mechanics
is the study of the way the world really
works. The classical laws of motion
developed by Newton work well enough on the scale of phenomena that are
directly perceivable by our senses and larger, but fail on the smaller
scale of atomic and nuclear physics. But beyond that, atomic motions
are reflected
in the properties of collections of atoms, so this failure has
consequences we can see for ourselves every day. Examples include the
discrete wavelengths produced
in sodium arc lamps and the properties of solid-state materials that
have
transformed technology. In all of this, the laws of Quantum Mechanics
have
been spectacularly successful in explaining all observations and
despite
the fact that Quantum Mechanics involves concepts that violate our
intuition,
there can be no doubt of its essential validity. In earlier
classes
you have seen some of the ideas of Quantum Mechanics presented, but
here
you begin a more rigorous study of how to apply the methods of Quantum
Mechanics to physical problems. |
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The text for the course is Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by David
Griffiths.
By and large, I find Griffiths to be a good text and very close to the
way that I would present the material. I will assign weekly problem
sets that will be due at the beginning of
class on Thursday. There will not be any labs in this course. |
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There
will be two, one-hour, in-class midterms. These will be held on Tuesday
October 5th and Tuesday November 9th. There will also be
a midterm at the time (6:30PM, Friday, December 17) scheduled by the
Registrar
for our final exam in this class. This will be a two-hour midterm exam,
but with the same weight as the other
midterms.
Your final grade will be an average of the grades from your homework
and midterms with the following weights:
In addition, there is an opportunity for extra credit. There will be a Physics Department colloquium on most Fridays this semester. I will add a bonus for attending the talks in the amount of (grade on 4 pt scale w/o bonus)*(fraction of talks attended)*(0.1). To give you a sense of this, if you attend 100% of the talks and have a 3.0 average grade, you would get a bonus of 0.3 raising your grade from 3.0 to 3.3. This would raise your final grade from a B to a B+. (My one exception to this is that I will not raise an A to an A+ by this route.)
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| I absolutely encourage you to work with others while doing homework and studying for tests. There is no curve in this class, so it never hurts you to help others, and teaching others will deepen your own understanding. However, it is important to the learning process that what you turn in represents your own understanding and should never be just a copy of others work. To test your understanding, try putting away all notes from a joint problem solving session and do the problems over by yourself, reminding yourself of the reasoning behind each step. |