Important Announcements & Calendar Items are posted on the Announcements Page, linked below. Also below are links to Pages where Lectures, Homework Solutions, & Old Exams (+ solutions) are posted.

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.

2. Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics! Did you ever wonder why there aren't more women physicists? Actually, a number of women made very important contributions to many areas of physics in the 1900's. Here is a website which discusses this in detail!

3. 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. Of course, we spend more time on the Largrangian formalism than the Newtonian one. However, 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.

4. In most of this course, we use mostly 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.

5. A 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 primary reason for discussing Hamiltonian mechanics is that it formed the basis or starting point for Schrodinger's development of the wave mechanics version of Quantum Mechanics! If you've wondered where the Quantum Mechanical Hamiltonian came from, you'll learn about that in detail when we get to Hamiltonian mechanics. A web page about Hamilton is Here. A "Google" search found 32,500 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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