Course Information

PHY 114 is the continuation of PHY 113. The topics of electromagnetism, light, optics, relativity, quantum mechanics, atomic physics and nuclear physics will be covered at an introductory level. Students are assumed to have a working knowledge of basic calculus and the material covered in PHY 113. The course is designed for science majors who are not majoring in physics or engineering.

We have two major goals in this course as far as each of you is concerned. One goal is to provide you with a basic survey of the principles of electromagnetism and modern physics and an appreciation of the importance of these principles to your world. The other goal is to develop in you the ability and confidence to attack analytical problems.

Instructors

For the names and contact information for the faculty and teaching assistants for this course, see the People page of this website.

Textbooks:

Required:

Physics for Scientists and Engineers, vols. 2 and 3, 4th edition, by Douglass Giancoli

If you want to work out additional problems over and above those assigned in the course, the book publisher has a web-site called masteringphysics.com which can help you. This is not required.

On reserve in the POA Library (3rd floor Bausch and Lomb Hall):

Lectures

Tuesday and Thursday 12:30 - 13:45 in Hoyt Auditorium Notes for each day's lecture are posted on the Calendar page of this web-site. They may be updated after the lecture. The Calendar page will also contain the course syllabus (which may get revised as the course progresses) and suggested reading assignments from the text to accompany each lecture.

Announcements

Course Website: If you are reading this, you have found the course web-site -

http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~rajeev/phy114

The course website will be used extensively for distributing course materials such as lecture notes, homework problems and solutions. The home page of the site is where we will post time sensitive announcements. Please check there regularly. If something is on the course web-site, you are responsible for knowing it!

Workshops

Each student in the course must be enrolled in one workshop section. Your workshop will meet once a week for two hours. Experience from past courses shows that consistent attendance at workshops strongly correlates with a better grade in the course. In fact, participation in workshops correlates even higher than attendance at lectures with success in the course.

Each week the workshop leader will guide you in thinking about and trying to solve one or more problems related to the material covered the previous week in lecture. These problems will generally be chosen from that week's homework.

Workshop leaders will keep track of workshop attendance, which will be one of the measures we will use to assess the level of effort you have put into the course. This level of effort may be taken into account when assigning the final letter grade for the course and will serve as the deciding factor in cases that are on the borderline between two letter grades.

Workshops begin on Jan 24th.

Please look in the People page for office hours.

Workshop CRN Day Time Room Leader Email
1 56561 R 1525-1805 HYLAN 206 Arijit Bose arijit@pas.rochester.edu
2 56576 W 1650-1930 HYLAN 306 Hyein Jeon hyein.jeon@rochester.edu
3 56587 M 1650-1930 MOREY 524 Gerardo Viza gerviza@pas.rochester.edu
4 56609 W 1815-2055 MEL 209 Christina Kayastha ckayasth@u.rochester.edu
5 56614 W 1400-1640 B&L 270 Gabrielle Tepp gtepp@pas.rochester.edu
6 56646 W 1525-1805 HUTCH 138 Erica Kaminski erica@pas.rochester.edu
7 56671 T 1525-1805 HYLAN 101 Gabrielle Tepp gtepp@pas.rochester.edu
8 56716 T 1650-1930 WILMT 116 Erica Kaminski erica@pas.rochester.edu
9 56727 F 1300-1515 MOREY 524 Arijit Bose arijit@pas.rochester.edu
10 56738 M 1300-1515 HYLAN 203 Gabrielle  Tepp gtepp@pas.rochester.edu
11 56740 R 1650-1930 B& L 269 Eric Nielsen eric.nielsen@rochester.edu
12 56752 R 1815-2055 B&L 270       Michael Smith michael.smith@rochester.edu
13 56769 M 1940-2200 MOREY 524 Gerardo Viza gerviza@pas.rochester.edu
14 56774 F 1100-1300 B&L 208 Arijit Bose arijit@pas.rochester.edu
15 56783 M 1815-2055 B&L 270 Jacob Tutmaher jtutmahe@u.rochester.edu
16 56795 T 1400-1640 HUTCH 138 Erica Kaminski erica@pas.rochester.edu

Laboratory

The laboratory part of this course is conducted independently of the lectures. Information about the labs may be found on the lab website

www.pas.rochester.edu/~physlabs

You must satisfactorily do and pass all the labs in order to get a grade for this course.

Anyone failing to satisfactorily pass all the labs receives an incomplete in the course.

Laboratory will count 15% towards you total course grade. Of this 15%, 10% at full credit will be given to all students who pass all the labs. The remaining 5% will be based on your total score on the pre-lab questions that accompany each lab. Pre-lab questions will be collected at the start of each lab. Pre-lab questions will NOT be accepted late. All questions concerning the laboratory should be addressed to the laboratory email address, physlabs@pas.rochester.edu, or addressed to the faculty member in charge of the labs, Prof. Bodek. In most cases the physlabs email address is the appropriate destination for your questions and is more likely to yield a timely response.

Homework

It is essential to work through problems in order to gain a complete understanding of the material. Each week on Friday a new problem set will be posted on the Calendar page of this website.

You must complete your solutions to these problems and turn them in by noon on the second following Monday (i.e. you have 10 days to complete the assignment). Your solutions must be turned into the PHY 114 homework locker located on the ground floor of B&L (near the entrance to the tunnels).

You must put your workshop number clearly on the top of your solutions. Your workshop number is a number from 1 to 16 that identifies your workshop. You may find it in the table above.

Our goal with these problem sets is not to test your abilities, but rather to help you understand the material. Therefore, from each problem set one problem will be chosen at random and will be graded for effort. It is not necessary that you have the correct solution to the problem to get credit, only that it be evident that you have made a hard and honest attempt to do the problem. The best 8 out of 10 assignments will count 10% towards your final course grade. We reserve the right to switch this grading system from the one problem method above to a "scan for effort" through the entire problem set.

You are encouraged to discuss the problems with your classmates both before and after the problems are due. However, the more you struggle with each problem on your own before asking for help, the more you are likely to understand the answer. Relying on your classmates for the solutions will only cause you disaster on the exams! Although you may discuss problems with your colleagues, you must write your own solutions independently.

Solutions which are handed in late will not be accepted. A big motivation of the problem sets is to keep you from falling behind in the course, so accepting late assignments defeats this purpose. Our grading policy allows you to miss up to two problem sets with no direct effect on your grade. However failure to do problem sets, and so not learn that week's material at the level we expect, is a sure way to do poorly on the exams and get a poor grade in the course. We therefore urge you to do all the problem sets, even if it is too late to hand one in.

After each problem set is handed in, solutions will be posted on the Homework page of this web-site. Regardless of how well you think you have done on your own solutions, you should read these posted solutions carefully to make sure you have no mistakes, misconceptions or holes in your understanding. Remember, physics does not cram easily!

Continue reading the page on grades to find out how your grade is determined.