Course Materials - Physics Topics

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Physics Topics

Dimensional Analysis

• Dimensional Analysis

• Energy estimate of first atomic bomb

• Buckingham Pi Theorem, Hanche-Olsen, Order of Magnitude Physics (Postscript), Examples

Free Fall and Terminal Velocity

• Speed of a Sky Diver

• Surviving Free Fall?

Simple Harmonic Motion

• The Simple Harmonic Oscillator

• Simple Pendulum

• The Pendulum Lab

• Notes on the Forced Harmonic Oscillator (PDF)

• Forced Harmonic Motion

• Visualizing Free and Forced Oscillations in Maple

• Video Lecture 8

• Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster

• Physics and Acoustics of Baseball and Softball Bats

• LRC Circuits

  • Background and Theory

Coupled Oscillations

• Coupled Systems

Nonlinear Oscillations and Chaos

The Vibrating String

• Derivation of Wave Equation for Vibrating String 1, 2

• Here is a summary and some animations showing how symmetries are used to construct solutions to the wave equation. 

  • Explanation Html File,  Postscript file

  • Example 1 HTML version, Maple version (Examples for two fixed ends) 
    Example 2 HTML version, Maple version (Examples for one end fixed and the other free)
    Example 3 HTML version, Maple version (Presentation of the odd extensions needed to solve the problem of two fixed ends with g(x)=0.)

• Animated Solutions of Heat Equation and Plucked String Maple 14 File

Maxwell's Equations and Electromagnetic Waves

• Electromagnetic Waves - The Physics Hypertextbook

Higher Dimensional Vibrations

• Rectangular Membrane, Circular Membrane, Annular Membrane
• Circular Membrane Modes

• Vibrations and Waves - Animations

• Maple Files annulus, vibdrum

• Plots of Bessel Functions

• Essentials of Bessel Functions

• Bessel Functions and a Vibrating Drum 

• Automatic Computation of Zeros of Bessel Functions and Other Special Functions

• Frequency Content of Drums

• Acoustic Properties of Drums

• Synthesizing Percussion and Spectra

• You Can't Always Hear the Shape of a Drum and more

The Hydrogen Atom

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