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| Instructor: Timothy S. Sullivan Office: MAP 206 Email: Sullivan@Kenyon.edu Phone: 427-5830 Office Hours: Tuesday, 10:10 - 11AM and 1:10 - 4PM, Th 10:10 - 11AM |
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| Required Text: Daniel Schroeder, "An Introduction to Thermal Physics." See the author's web site for corrections to the book . |
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This course
is essentially about what happens when you bring together large numbers
of particles, as happens, for example, whenever you have even a speck
of
ordinary matter. (A gram of atomic hydrogen contains about 6 x 1023
atoms!) So much of the material in the course is essential for
understanding
how our world is constructed and we will see many examples in which
this
is the theme. Since there is no chance that we can solve Newton’s Laws
for this many particles, we will see that we will have to be content
with
a statistical description of the motion of particles. The ideal gas
(consisting
of classical non-interacting particles) will be one of our most
important
touchstones, but we will also examine systems of spins as models of
magnetism
and the "mattress model" of the mechanical vibrations of solids, as
well
as several others. Toward the end of the semester, quantum mechanics
will
make a surprising appearance, allowing us to use the quantum version of
the ideal gas to explain many of the properties of metals,
superconductors,
and neutron stars. |
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I’ve come
to believe that what I do in a course pales in comparison to what you
do
in a course in terms of what you end up learning. So I will do little
lecturing
in the course, rather I will serve as a moderator of discussions during
class. I will assign readings before each class and it is crucial that
you do the readings before coming to class. To encourage this, I will
assign
problems on the reading that will be due at the beginning of each
class.
I will not grade these in detail, I will just note that they were
attempted
and whether you got the right answer. In addition, I will assign weekly
problem sets that will be due at the beginning of class on Wednesdays.
I hope to arrange a few labs/demonstrations to illustrate some of the
concepts,
but there will not be a regular lab in this course. There will be two,
one-hour, in-class midterms at a time to be scheduled later. There will
also be a midterm at the time (8:30AM, Saturday, May 11) scheduled by
the
Registrar for our final exam in this class, but it will also be a
one-hour
midterm exam with the same weight as the others. Your final grade will
be an average of the grades from your daily problems, homework, and
midterms
with the following weights:
In addition, there is an opportunity for extra credit. There
will be
a Physics Department colloquium nearly every Friday 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.) |