Basic Info

  • Instructor: Dave Feldman
  • Email:dfeldman@coa.edu
  • Pronouns: he/him/his
  • Problem Solving Sessions: TBA, via Zoom. (only for COA students)

Course Goals

  1. Maintain intellectual and personal connection in a time of dispersal and isolation.
  2. Experience the challenge, joy, and beauty of theoretical physics.
  3. Gain a firm, grounded, enduring understanding of the basic elements of special relativity.
  4. Improve your problem solving skills and mathematical confidence.

Course Structure

  • For each unit I wil post a number of videos.
  • Interspersed beween these videos will be short quizzes. These quizzes are required, but ungraded.
  • There will be weekly problem sets, most or all of which will be on Edfinity. Some assignments may also have a component on google classroom.
  • There is a piazza discussion forum. You can ask questions here, help answer other students' questions, and take part in general discussions.
  • We will read a book by Peter Galison. We'll engage with this text through some combination of short writing assignments, blog posts, and small group discussions.

Books

  • I will follow the exposition in Thomas A. Moore, Six Ideas that Shaped Physics: Unit R: The Laws of Physics are Frame-Independent, McGraw Hill, 1998. You do not, however, need to purchase the text.
  • We will also read Peter Galison, Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, WW Norton & Company, 2004. I will use the course fee to get a copy of this book for each of you.

Evaluation

Roughly...

  • Weekly Homework Assignments: 70 percent.
  • Paper/Blog Posts/Discussions: 20 percent.
  • Participation in Discussion Forum: 10 percent.

I do not have any quota of A's, B's, etc. This is an unusual time. I'd strongly consider taking this class without letter grades. Perhaps for some of you not having letter grades will reduce anexity. I'm happy to talk through options if anyone wants.

Policies and Details

  1. There will be one homework assignment for each unit. It is essential that you do these assignments, as this is most of what your evaluation will be based on.
  2. If you need extra time for one or two of the homework assignments, it's not a big deal. But be very careful to not fall farther behind every week.
  3. You are strongly encouraged to work together on homework. You can also consult me, class tutors, other faculty, friends, and family. However, the homework you hand in should represent your own understanding.
  4. You will want to have at your disposal a scientific calculator or phone/tablet app. I strongly suggest an actual calculator. You do not need a graphing calculator for this course (or, in my opinion, ever).
  5. As I plan on sending out homework assignments and other information via email/google classroom, it is important that you check your email/classroom regularly.
  6. Academic misconduct---cheating, plagiarizing, etc.---is bad. Any cases of academic misconduct may result in a judicial hearing. Here is the faculty-approved statement about plagiarism:

Standard Disclaimers

  • You should expect to spend a minimum of 150 academically engaged hours associated with this one-credit course. These 150 hours will be spent roughly as follows: 4 hr/wk "in" class, 1 hr/wk on discussion forums, 2 hr/wk reading, 1hr/wk writing papers/blog posts, 7 hr/wk on homework.
  • By enrolling in an academic institution, a student is subscribing to common standards of academic honesty. Any cheating, plagiarism, falsifying or fabricating of data is a breach of such standards. A student must make it his or her responsibility to not use words or works of others without proper acknowledgment. Plagiarism is unacceptable and evidence of such activity is reported to the academic dean or his/her designee. Two violations of academic integrity are grounds for dismissal from the college. Students should request in-class discussions of such questions when complex issues of ethical scholarship arise.