This week was a very short week consisting of only two days. We met as usual on Monday, but Tuesday was a “flip day” and ran as a Friday. This class doesn’t meet on Fridays so we only had one day this week, and we devoted it to tying up loose ends from chapter 17. […]
Read More Matter & Interactions II, Week 9This week, I was away at the winter AAPT meeting in Atlanta. Students began working on the experiments from chapter 17, which serve to introduce magnetic fields. I want to emphasize some really cool things about the mathematical expression for a particle’s magnetic field: This is really a single particle form of the Biot-Savart law. […]
Read More Matter & Interactions II, Week 7The Maxwell equations contain everything mentioned in an introductory calculus-based electromagnetic theory course, and then some. They contain detailed mathematical structure and deep insight into electromagnetic fields. They are a magnificent playground for learning the various theorems of vector calculus, and applying these theorems to the fields of particles naturally leads to things like divergence, […]
Read More Conceptual Understanding in Introductory Physics XVIII: The Maxwell Equations