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Physics 235: Classical Mechanics
Prof. S. Teitel stte@pas.rochester.edu ----- Fall 2001

Lecture Notes

My hand written class lecture notes are being scanned and uploaded for you to view. Please be warned that these are the notes I prepare for myself to lecture from - they are not in general carefully prepared for others to read. I make no guarentees about their legibility, or that they are totally free of errors. I hope, nevertheless that you will find them useful. The lectures are uploaded as pdf files, so you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to read them. You can download Acrobat Reader for free here.

These lecture notes are also available online from the University Library's Voyager system. Just go to Voyager, click on "Local Catalogue", choose "Course Reserve", select "Teitel, S" from the instructor menu, and hit the Search button. On the resulting page, click on "Course notes [electronic]".

The lecture note files correspond roughly to the material presented in a given day's lecture. But you may on occassion find the end of one day's lecture at the start of the file for the next day's lecture, so please look there if you think there might be something missing.

• Lecture 1 - Review of vectors
  

• Lecture 2 - Rotation matrices
  

• Lecture 3 - Velocity and acceleration in polar and spherical coordinates; gradients

  Note: there is an error at the bottom of page 7, top of page 8, of these notes in the equation for d(e_theta)/dt in spherical coordinates. The correct equation should be:

  d(e_theta)/dt = -d(theta)/dt e_r + d(phi)/dt cos(theta) e_phi

• Lecture 4 - Review of Newton's laws and conservation theorems
  

• Lecture 5 - Applications of Newton's laws
  

• Lecture 6 - Harmonic oscillator: oscillators in two dimensions, and damped oscillators
  

• Lecture 7 - Driven harmonic oscillator: resonance
  

• Lecture 8 - Driven harmonic oscillator: work and energy
  

• Lecture 9 - Driven harmonic oscillator: Fourier series and Greens function solutions
  

• Lecture 10 - Calculus of Variations: Euler's equation
  

• Lecture 11 - Calculus of Variations: examples and second form of Euler's equation
  

• Lecture 12 - Calculus of Variations with constraints, Lagrange's equations, and Hamilton's principle
  

• Lecture 13 - Lagrange's equations: examples
  

• Lecture 14 - Lagrange's equations with constraints: examples
  

• Lecture 15 - Examples continued, velocity dependent potentials
  

• Lecture 16 - Conservation laws, Hamilton's equations
  

• Lecture 17 - Hamilton's equations: examples
  

• Lecture 18 - Two body motion with a cental force
  

• Lecture 19 - Two body motion continued: 1/r² force
  

• Lecture 20 - Conic sections, Kepler's 3rd law
  

• Lecture 21 - Stability of orbits: 1/rⁿ force, and screened Coulomb potential
  

• Lecture 22 - Rutherford scattering

  Note: There is an error in the first equation of page one. In the denominator the parenthesis is closed in the wrong place. It should be 2µ(E-U-el²/(2µr²))

• Lecture 23 - Dynamics of many particle systems: momentum, angular momentum, and energy
  

• Lecture 24 - Non-inertial frames of reference
  

• Lecture 25 - Coriolis force, motion at the surface of the earth
  

• Lecture 26 - Dynamics of rigid bodies: the inertia tensor
  

• Lecture 27 - Angular momentum of rigid bodies, principle axes of rotation
  

• Lecture 28 - Inertia tensor under transformation of coordinates, Euler's equations, stability of freely rotating bodies