Wednesday, we will probably have limited time in the lab in order to get through the next material. It will be easier to explain with a longer block of time at my disposal, so we'll mostly do lecture on Wednesday and devote Friday entirely to lab work [i.e., no lecture on Friday, but there will be lab work to turn in].
We've slipped a bit from the schedule I posted at the start of the semester (somewhat anticipated), I'll be revising that soon to reflect current reality. Along those lines: let's make HW3 due Thursday at midnight, with HW4 coming out then.
Wednesday, we're going to finish off our discussion of potential by figuring out how to find the energy required to assemble solid distributions of charge - for example, how much energy does it cost to assemble a uniform sphere of charge? After that, we'll discuss the peculiarities of charged conductors, which will set us up for discussing current and the last bits we'll need to start circuit analysis. As an aside, we'll learn a neat problem solving trick, the method of images. It is really a general technique for solving differential equations, which amounts to 'make the problem look like something else, and write down the answer.'
Friday will be an 'inquiry-based' laboratory session, a fancy way of saying that I'm going to pose a problem for you to solve, and see what you can figure out. The general idea is to let you fiddle around with circuits for a while and learn how to make things work, so when we finally know how to analyze & design circuits mathematically, you'll already know how to turn ideas into reality. Or, more simply: paper circuits and equations don't do a thing, we want to build things.
We've slipped a bit from the schedule I posted at the start of the semester (somewhat anticipated), I'll be revising that soon to reflect current reality. Along those lines: let's make HW3 due Thursday at midnight, with HW4 coming out then.
Wednesday, we're going to finish off our discussion of potential by figuring out how to find the energy required to assemble solid distributions of charge - for example, how much energy does it cost to assemble a uniform sphere of charge? After that, we'll discuss the peculiarities of charged conductors, which will set us up for discussing current and the last bits we'll need to start circuit analysis. As an aside, we'll learn a neat problem solving trick, the method of images. It is really a general technique for solving differential equations, which amounts to 'make the problem look like something else, and write down the answer.'
Friday will be an 'inquiry-based' laboratory session, a fancy way of saying that I'm going to pose a problem for you to solve, and see what you can figure out. The general idea is to let you fiddle around with circuits for a while and learn how to make things work, so when we finally know how to analyze & design circuits mathematically, you'll already know how to turn ideas into reality. Or, more simply: paper circuits and equations don't do a thing, we want to build things.
No comments:
Post a Comment