Physics for Poets (I)

Elementary Physics for Non-Technical Students (I)

Welcome to the Elementary Physics (I) course, PHY 309 K. This syllabus describes the section taught by Professor Vadim Kaplunovsky in Fall of 2006 (unique #61680). Other sections have their own syllabi.

Elementary Physics is a non-technical course intended for liberal-arts and other non-science majors, hence the nickname «Physics for Poets»; it's more about Physics than Physics itself. Nevertheless, the language of Physics is Mathematics, and I will use formulae. You do not need calculus or higher math to follow this class, but basic algebra is essential.

General Information

Textbook:

«Physics Matters: An Introduction to Conceptual Physics» by James Trefil and Robert M Hazen.

Instructor:

• Professor Vadim Kaplunovsky
• Office: RLM 9.314A
• Phone: 471-4918
• Email: vadim@physics.utexas.edu, plain text or HTML mail only, no MS Word attachments.
• Reserved office hour: Wednesday, 3 to 4 PM.
• Other office hours (I am likely to be in my office and available, but no guarantees): Monday after 3:30 PM, Thursday after 2 PM, maybe Friday afternoon.
• Please use email only for simple questions about homeworks or administrivia. If you need an explanation of some subject, please see me in person.

TA:

• Xiaohui Gao
• "Office": Coaching tables on 5^th floor of RLM building
• Hours: Wednesday 4 to 5 pm and Thursday 11 am to 12 noon
• Email: gaoxh@physics.utexas.edu

Lectures:

• On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from 12 to 1, in Painter hall, PAI 2.48.
• Attendance is mandatory.
• Disruption of lectures will not be tolerated. Persistent or egregious disruptiveness will lower your grade (if appropriate, all the way to F).

Homework

Homework for this course will be assigned weekly, although sometimes I will give you an extra classday to catch up. Altogether, there will be ten to twelve homework assignments.

Most homework problems will be taken from the textbook, but I will also add a few of my own. Each assignment will be posted on the web page http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~vadim/Classes/06f/homework/HWpage.html. The solutions will be posted to the same page after the due date.

Each homework set is due a week from the day it was assigned. I shall collect finished homeworks in class; please do not bring them to my office or mailbox.

You may do homework individually or in small teams of two, three, or four students; larger teams are not allowed. A team should submit a single solution signed by all the students in the team. If you work in a team, make sure you understand the whole solution — otherwise you will flunk the exams.

Exams

There will be three mid-terms tests during the semester and one final exam.

All exams are open-book. You may bring any books or notes you like, provided you can manage them at your seat without disturbing other students. But you must do your exam by yourself: Getting help from another person during the exam is not allowed. For this reason, using cellphones or Internet during the exam is not allowed.

Please bring your ID to all tests, especially to the final exam. To prevent cheating, we (me and the TA) will ID all students. If you don't have a UT ID, bring your driver's license or passport.

Bring a calculator. Most exam problems can be done with pencil-and-paper arithmetic, but sometimes a calculator can speed up the work.

Each mid-term test takes 50 minutes (1 class hour). The mid-terms will be held in the regular classtime, in the usual classroom. The first test will be in late September, the second in late October, and the third in late November. The exact dates will be announced in class (and also on this page) a week or two before each test.

• The first mid-term will be on October 2 (Monday). It will cover textbook chapters 2, 3, 4 and the first half of chapter 5.
• The second mid-term will be on October 30 (Monday). It will cover textbook chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8.
• The third mid-term will be on November 29 (Wednesday). It will cover textbook chapters 8, 12, 9, 10 (including the gas laws but not the elasticity), and the beginning of chapter 11 (temperature, absolute temperature, and thermal expansion).

Only two best mid-term tests will count towards your grade. This allows for one missed or botched test (because of illness or emergency) without damage to your grade. But if you miss two or all three tests, your grade will suffer. There will be no make-up tests for any reason whatsoever.

If one test happens to be much easier than the other two, the students who missed the easy test will get a few extra points to compensate for the difference.

The final exam is scheduled for December 14 (Thursday) from 9 AM to 12 N (3 hours), in room ESB 115. This exam is comprehensive and covers the whole course, from the beginning to the very end.

Grades

The grades are based on homeworks, mid-term tests, and the final exam with the following weights:

• Twenty percent (20%) of the average homework score. To allow for emergencies, the averaging skips two worst homeworks of the semester. Missing homeworks count as zero score, so missing one or two homeworks does not hurt your grade, but if you miss three or more, your grade will suffer.
• Twenty percent (20%) of the the best mid-term test, plus another twenty percent (20%) of the second-best mid-term. Altogether, the mid-term tests contribute 40% of the grade.
• Forty percent (40%) of the final exam score.

The net score will be adjusted upward according to lecture attendance. The adjustment is non-linear: It is small for high scores but becomes important when the score is low but the attendance is high.

The brackets for the ABCDF letter grades in terms of the adjusted net scores will be set after the final exam.