Welcome to the course page for General Physics II. My schedule is on the welcome page of this site for your convenience in setting up appointments. Check back frequently for homework, updated course documents, etc. I’ll post solutions to homework and some in class exercises here to motivate your preparation for exams.
Physics for Science & Math II – Course Documents
Any of these may change at my discretion, but the date of the most recent change will be in parentheses.
Syllabus (v2024.01.14)
Schedule (v2024.01.23)
v2024.01.21 flip flopped 22/24 April, includes HW10
v2024.01.23 cyclic permutation, includes HW10
Physics 102 Reference Card (v2023.02.14)
Open Stax General Physics Text: Here
Course Lab Manual (v.2015.12)
here’s a general guide to grading and a problem-solving template, as well as a primer on significant figures.
RINSC Field Trip
Meet at the Rhode Island Nuclear Science Center (date/time is on the schedule), located at the Bay Campus of URI. Parking is available in the surrounding lots, and the campus is bus accessible. Invite your friends, please carpool, and ensure you read and adhere to the information in the RINSCInfo memo for visitors. Admission depends on it, as well as being on the roster. If you’re bringing a friend, we need to know that (with contact info).
google map of the bay campus. You can’t miss the reactor (big cube).
Here’s the Half-Life Lab activity we’ll be doing, and a link to the database referenced therein.
Jeff Davis has been kind enough to share with us the presentation he will give as part of the reactor tour. You can access it here and consider it part of the testable material for the course.
Physics for Science & Math II – Supplementary Stuff
A section of my notes on the dot and cross products for multiplying vectors. You’ve already essentially done it in PHYS101, though you may not have called it what it is yet (work is a dot product and torque is a cross product, for instance). Regardless of your experience in PHYS101, we’ll deal with multiplication of vectors in this course.
When we use physlets, there could be issues with compatibility on the classroom PCs. If that happens, you may access the activities via this website: compadre.org. Also helpful as a resource at home as you study for exams – explore the many problems and activities we don’t do in class!
Here are a couple of videos. The first is more interesting for us and we’ll be able to explain how these things happen with our PHYS102 content. The second is a Rube Goldberg machine of sorts, but uses glass and magnetic spheres to add a different spin to the usual fare.
Here’s a PHeT simulation that is super helpful for visualizing the concepts of magnetic fields, flux, and Faraday’s Law. If you can explain how every possible perturbation of the parameters in all the tabs within this simulation generate the observed events, you’ll be sitting pretty. Of course, if you can’t, you know where to find me.
And this slideshow is a supplement to the ray tracing work for lenses and mirrors. There’s a nice PhET simulation to help explore the ray tracing for lenses here. It’s a lot faster than actually drawing them out, but be aware that you won’t have the simulation to play with on the exam.
Class and Lab Follow-Ons
Here’s a simulation of the half-life lab written in Mathematica. You will need either to download the CDF player from the Wolfram website or have me let you into the Computational Lab across the hall from my office to use it.
Physics for Science & Math II – Old Exams Folder
These are hosted (above link) for the sole purpose of helping you determine how course concepts and activities become exam items. Please don’t ask me to post the solutions. I don’t provide them purposely because if I do the resource becomes worthless – these become just more worked examples and you have access to hundreds of those via the Schaum’s outlines.
The best way to use them is to “take” one when you think you’re ready to take my exam. Use no references but the PRC. If you can get through it confidently in whatever the time on the cover page says those students had, you’re probably good to go. If not, do more problems. Of course, this is not an effective strategy if the whole of your studying is condensed into the evening before the exam.
While I won’t provide the solutions or do the problems for you, I am eager to discuss your attempts at office hours and guide you to do them yourselves.
Physics for Science & Math II – New Exams
Exam I: 14 February (solution)
Exam II: 20 March (solution)
Exam III: 29 April (solution)
As you prepare for exams, remember that I consider every problem we have seen in class, in the book (as examples or homework), and in lab to be free chicken. That is, if these things show up on exams, I expect them to be done perfectly and have put them on the exam to ensure everyone can pass every exam. You will need to extend the knowledge of what you’ve definitely seen to things you haven’t definitely seen. Doing more problems from the end of the chapter than are assigned is the best way to test whether you’re ready for the challenge.
Physics for Science & Math II – Homework
HW01: 2023.01.24 (assignment | solution)
HW02: 2023.02.05 (assignment | solution)
HW03: 2023.02.07 (assignment | solution)
HW04: 2023.02.21 (assignment | solution)
HW05: 2023.02.28 (assignment | solution)
HW06: 2023.03.18 (assignment | solution)
HW07: 2023.03.27 (assignment | solution)
HW08: 2023.04.03 (assignment | solution)
HW09: 2023.04.17 (assignment | solution)
HW10: 2023.04.24 (assignment | solution)
Below is a link to a list of problems I like from the text. I expect that you will pass the course if you can solve all of them without notes. The more problems you do, the better prepared you’ll be to encounter the new ones on exams – you ought to do more than what are on the list.
Once a problem is done, don’t abandon it. Revisit it and try to solve it again a different way, perturb it and see how the answer changes. Predict what other questions could be asked about the same physical scenario – what other information would you need to be given in order to be asked these questions, etc. I like to take problems I know you’ve solved (or have at least been asked to), change up the known and unknown quantities, and put them on exams. The best way to study is then pretty clear.
Physics for Science & Math II – Help!
See the ‘Welcome’ page of this site for my current schedule of office hours, when you’ll have my undivided attention. The College also employs student tutors and makes them available free of charge to you. If the link above is out of date, sit tight. It takes a week or two for the schedule to take shape each term.