Course Reports
drorzel | January 19, 2011We did a lab yesterday that asked students to measure the speed of a ball leaving a spring-loaded launcher in a few different ways. this is a great way to talk about the difference between systematic and random errors and how those are dealt with. As a way of starting that discussion, I asked the students to calculate the speeds last night, and then enter their values in an Excel sheet when they came to class this morning. Since generating a sensible plot in Excel 2007 is such a gigantic pain in the ass, I used an older data set to set up a template, and made a graph of the quantities we were…
drorzel | January 5, 2011Kate and SteelyKid have colds (well, they're sharing the same cold), so SteelyKid is waking up a lot during the night. Since Kate needs rest as well, she put earplugs in last night (she's a much lighter sleeper than I am), and I took baby-soothing duty. So I was up half the night.
I come in for my 9:15 class, turn on the projector so I can project my slides, and the projector is dead. A bunch of fiddling with it reveals that it's not just a blown bulb (which happened Monday morning), but a broken projector. So, no lecture slides.
"All right," I say, "I'll just do a chalk-talk using my…
drorzel | November 10, 2010We've just recently completed pre-registration for Winter term classes, so I've been thinking a bit about why students do and do not sign up for things. Thus, a poll:
You are a college student considering an elective class in your major, and you see it has a lab. Your reaction is:survey software
Feel free to replace "English" with the non-lab-science major of your choice when answering.
drorzel | April 28, 2010I'm teaching Physics 350: Quantum Mechanics this term, which is a junior/senior level elective course using Townsend's book which deals with quantum mechanics in the state vector formalism. The room in which the class meets is the only one in the department that contains a whiteboard (using dry-erase markers) rather than a blackboard (using chalk).
In the first several weeks of the course, I have mostly been using blue markers, because that's what's been in the room. These fade into illegibility very quickly, so today I went into the stockroom to get more, and discovered a box of black…
drorzel | February 2, 2010Tuesday is a heavy teaching day for me-- I'm in lab from 9-4, basically-- so here's something to occupy the time. Oh, no! It's a pop quiz:
Pop quizzes are:(survey software)
(In case the phrase is an American idiom, a "pop quiz" refers to a short test given in class with no advance warning.)
This was inspired by Dermot O'Brien at Inside Higher Ed, who reports on taking his first quiz as a science student. The general topic of quizzes is one that generates a fair bit of heat, though, so I thought I'd see what my readers think of it.
My quiz policy as of a year or so ago was to give many short…
drorzel | November 6, 2009Today's Quantum Optics lecture is about quantum computing experiments, and how different types of systems stack up. Quantum computing, as you probably know if you're reading this blog, is based on building a computer whose "bits" can not only take on "0" and "1" states, but arbitrary superpositions of "0" and "1". Such a computer would be able to out-perform any classical computer on certain types of problems, and would open the exciting possibility of a windows installation that is both working and hung up at the same time.
There are roughly as many types of proposed quantum computers as…
drorzel | October 22, 2009I've been buried in lab grading for a lot of this week, but I'm finally down to the last few stragglers. The experience has me thinking a bit about what we're doing here, and talking to people in other departments, and it seems like a good question for my wise and worldly readers.
At the moment, we run on 10-week terms, and in a ten-week term, we typically do seven labs (the other three are canceled to make time for exams, or to avoid doing labs in the first or last week of the term. Some fraction of those seven labs are full formal reports, with an abstract, introduction, procedure, results…
drorzel | October 13, 2009The abbreviation here has a double meaning-- both "Open Access" and "Operator Algebra." In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe "coherent states" in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum description of a classical light field-- something like a laser, which behaves very much as if it were a smoothly oscillating electromagnetic field with a well-defined frequency and phase.
Mathematically, one of the important features of a coherent state is that it is unchanged by the photon annihilation operator (in formal terms, it's an "…
drorzel | October 2, 2009I'm teaching my Quantum Optics class again this term, out of a completely different textbook than last time around-- I'm using Mark Fox's Quantum Optics from the Oxford Master Series in AMO Physics, which is more of a regular textbook. I've got six students-- four junior and senior physics majors, one senior chemistry major, and a retired scientist from GE who is interested in catching up on the latest new stuff.
Last time around, I posted my lecture notes as I went through the class, but I've forgotten to do that thus far this term, here in the Freezing Hell of Lab Grading. So here's a big…
drorzel | June 10, 2009OK, it's not really a full post-mortem, because I haven't graded the final exams yet, but I wouldn't tell you about those, anyway. Still, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past term, which was my first teaching introductory mechanics on the Matter & Interactions curriculum.
On the whole, I continue to like the approach. I like the way that the book focuses on the major physical principles-- the Momentum Principle, the Energy Principle, the Angular Momentum Principle-- because those are the real take-away message from introductory physics. I also thing it's good that the class…
drorzel | March 31, 2009This is the final report on my modern physics class from last term, covering the last week of classes, which generally deal with nuclear and particle physics. This was actually three-and-a-bit classes, because I lost one class to a nasty cold a few weeks earlier, and used part of the lab period to make up for it.
Class 28 was actually taught by a colleague of mine (thanks, Rebecca!), because Kate and I were in Boston for her father's wake. She taught off my notes, though, so I'll still report it as if I did the class.
This class opens with a brief return of the historical treatment of the…
drorzel | March 31, 2009In the last course report post, we dispensed of atomic and molecular physics in just three classes. The next three classes do the same for solid state physics.
Class 25 picks up on the idea of basic molecular potentials from the end of the previous class, and uses that to introduce energy bands in a qualitative manner. Bringing two atoms together splits the electron levels into two states, adding a third adds more closely spaced levels, and so on. Every time you add more atoms, you add more closely spaced energy levels, and as you approach truly macroscopic systems, those states run together…
drorzel | March 31, 2009I got way behind on my reports from my Modern Physics class-- the last one was over month ago, and the class has since ended. There's enough material left to be really awkward as a single post, though, so I'm going to take my cue from Brandon Sanderson and split it into three parts.
The remaining material is from the sprint-to-the-end "Applications of Quantum Mechanics" portion of the class, and breaks into three roughly equal chunks. The first of these is dealing with atomic and molecular physics.
Class 22 presents the full quantum model of Hydrogen, starting from the Schrödinger equation…