Course information

Course description:

Ph136a will focus on thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, random processes, and optics (including various wave mechanics). A detailed syllabus will be made available after the first week, based on feedback regarding which of these topics the students would prefer to explore in more detail. The class material will be based on Kip Thorne and Roger Blandford’s book (below).

Class location:

Lauritsen 269

Class times:

Tuesday & Thursday, 2:30- 4:00 pm.

Instructor and TA:

Prof: Phil Hopkins

322 Cahill

x2563

phopkins -- at --- caltech.edu

www.tapir.caltech.edu/~phopkins

TA: Lev Spodyneiko

lionspo ----- at -- caltech.edu

Office hours: TBD

Target Audience:

Graduate students and advanced undergraduates

HOMEWORKs:

We will have weekly homework assignments. They will be given out in one of the lectures and due a week from that date, at lecture. In past years, a very popular policy was to assign on Tuesday, and have the homework be due the next *Thursday* (9 days later). The next homework still gets assigned 7 days later, but this gives students more flexibility -- if you want to turn in the problem sets early (on Tuesday, for example) you will always still have at least a full week to work on them.

If you don't want to submit homework in class, please use the TA's mailbox or email to him to turn in homework (we can discuss what's easiest for everyone in the first week). See the late policy below for more details.

In general, for all homework problems, unless otherwise specified by me or by the question, you should feel free to compute them at order-of-magnitude accuracy. We want the correct dimensional scalings, and concepts -- I'm less concerned with the factors of "2". When a problem needs you to use various specific values (say, the mass of the sun), feel free to use rough values (Msun = 2e33 grams, for example). Feel free to compute integrals and the like in Mathematica/Matlab/Maple/whatever; evaluate them numerically if needed.

MIDTERM:

In previous years, we've experimented with various formats for the midterm, including: short talks/presentations of current research (journal-club style but ~15 minutes), oral exams, a written exam, an extended problem set (take-home), or (the most popular in past years) asking students to give a presentation based on a practical demo. The duration should be relatively short, if you really need more than ~15 minutes, let me know. And while most will be presented during out midterm week, if for any scheduling reason (say, needing to use a lab, or wanting to observe a particular astronomical phenomenon) you want to do yours at a different time, let me know as soon as you can so we can schedule around it.

FINAL:

The final exam will be an oral exam, with the TA and myself asking questions based on material from the homeworks and lectures. Each student will have ~20 minutes, during which they will answer a few questions at the blackboard (answers will be primarily qualitative but diagrams/plots/examples will often be invoked). We will schedule the exam towards the final weeks of the course.

GRADING:

The final grade will be 60% homework, 10% midterm, 10% class participation, and 20% final exam.

TEXTBOOK(s):

The textbook for this course will be the textbook (which grew from the class notes from a

previous version of this class) by Kip Thorne and Roger Blandford, available at:

http://www.pmaweb.caltech.edu/Courses/ph136/yr2012/

The readings for Ph 136b, the companion course taught in the winter term, will also come from the same book. In this fall-term course, the course topics, and reading material, will primarily draw from Chapters 3-12 (beginning with Kinetic Theory and ending with Elastodynamics). The material in chapters 13+ forms the basis of Ph136b/c (the companion courses to this course).

Note the the new, published version of the textbook is finally available!

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10157.html

LATE HOMEWORK POLICY:

Homework extensions of up to 24 hours can be granted by the instructors or the TA, if a request is asked ahead of the deadline, and with reasonable cause. Longer extensions can only be approved by Phil. No late homework will be accepted unless one of these prior arrangements has been made. Unapproved late homework will not be graded.

COLLABORATION POLICY:

In working the homework sets, you may consult your own class notes, and any textbooks required or recommended for this class or any other reference books you find helpful (but please state which you use, if you do use books which are not the texts -- if only so we can add them to the list of useful references for other students!). You may also use calculator or a computer to do numeric and symbolic calculations, or as a word processor.

At no stage may you look at solutions to the problems you might find on friend's desks, on websites, filing cabinets, ftp sites, etc. This means no googling for the problem in hopes there is a solution already online somewhere.

Collaboration on the homeworks is allowed and encouraged, but this requires a cooperative effort. Your solutions must ultimately be your own work, in your own handwriting or typing. Copying someone else’s homework, or ‘trading’ answers to different problems, is not allowed. If you do work with other students on a problem set, you must identify whom you worked with on the submitted work.

Syllabus/Schedule:

This is a tentative syllabus based on past years. Given the small enrollment this year, we may adjust this based on student interests.

Week 1 (10/01) - Introduction. Organizational Discussion. Kinetic theory 1 & 2.

Week 2 (10/08) - StatMech 1 & 2. Homework 1 Due in Lecture 4.

Week 3 (10/15) - Thermo 1 & 2. Homework 2 Due

Week 4 (10/22) - Random Processes 1 & 2. Homework 3 Due.

Week 5 (10/29) - Random Processes Continued. Homework 4 Due. Midterm.

Week 6 (11/05) - (Phil away but there will be a substitute). Geometric Optics 1 & 2. Homework 5 Due.

Week 7 (11/12) - Diffraction 1 & 2, and Interference (beginning).

Week 8 (11/19) - No class owing to Thanksgiving holiday, but Homework 6 Due.

Week 9 (11/26) - Interference and Nonlinear optics 1 & 2 (finishing). Homework 7 Due.

Week 10 (12/03) - Solids & Elastostatics. Homework 8 Due. End of lecture period.

Week 11 (12/10) - Final exam week. See notes above.