STUDENT RESPONSIBILITIES
THIS IS A SENIOR COURSE!
I expect you to come to class prepared, do the homework,
READ the material BEFORE I lecture over it, & keep up as we go along!

Do you want to know more about Dr. Myles (education, experience, research, etc.)? His Homepage & his Research Page have details. For some physics news, go to Physics Central. For news at a more advanced level, go to Focus News from the American Physical Society. For some Physics Fun, click Here.

4. In this course, we talk mostly about the view of the physical (mechanical) world which was developed first by Galileo Galilei & later put into precise mathematical form by Sir Isaac Newton. The lives of both Galileo & Newton are interesting (to me) from a historical viewpoint as well as from a scientific viewpoint. The following two documents (Word format) give brief illustrations of what I mean by this. Here is a one page document about the life of Galileo Galilei. Here is a one page document about the life of Sir Isaac Newton. "Google" searches on Galileo & Newton give 5,880,000 hits & 21,800,000 hits, respectively!! A Galileo one is Here. A Newton one is Here.

5. Later in the course, we'll introduce the Lagrangian formulation of mechanics. This was first developed by Joseph Louis Lagrange. As we'll discuss in detail, this formulation is physically identical to the Newtonian formulation. However, because it makes no direct reference to forces, it can much more easily handle problems with constraints, where the forces of constraint might be among the unknowns of the problem! The life of Lagrange is also interesting to me. There are many web pages which give insight into his life. Here is an interesting one. Here is another. If you are interested, do a "Google" search yourself. My search found 4520 hits! Here is a Word document on Lagrange's life.

6. Another formulation of mechanics we'll discuss later is the Hamiltonian formulation, developed by Sir William Rowan Hamilton. This is also equivalent to the Newtonian formulation. Besides studying it to learn another formulation, a major reason for discussing Hamiltonian mechanics is that it formed the starting point for Schrodinger's development of the wave mechanics version of Quantum Mechanics! If you've already had Quantum Mechanics & wondered where the Hamiltonian came from, you will learn about it in detail when we get to Hamiltonian mechanics. A web pages about Hamilton is Here. A "Google" search found 3,340 hits.

The WORLD YEAR OF PHYSICS 2005 marks 100 years since Albert Einstein published 3 pioneering papers (Relativity, Brownian Motion, Photoelectric Effect), which changed physics forever & are considered the beginning of "modern" physics! (He won the 1921 Nobel Prize for the Photoelectric Effect!).  The United Nations, the US Congress, & the governments & scientific societies of many countries have endorsed it. 2005 events will highlight the vitality & importance of physics & bring physics excitement to the public. For more information, click the image on the left.

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