No musical experience necessary. In 1945, bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forever changed the nature of warfare. Assigned readings, daily discussions, and papers deal with these questions. Lectures, demonstrations and regular laboratory experiments concentrate primarily on the scientific background. This course is an analytical study of Newtonian mechanics, including the harmonic oscillator, central force motion, non-linear oscillators, chaos, and an introduction to the Lagrangian formulation.
Students use computers extensively.
Offered Fall Semester. 375 Maxwell's Equations This course utilizes integral and vector calculus in a thorough and analytic examination of classical electromagnetic theory and the physical laws on which it is based. Topics include electric and magnetic fields, macroscopic interaction of electromagnetism with matter, and the propagation of electromagnetic waves in various media. Offered Spring Semester. 376 Quantum Mechanics Students analytically investigate Quantum Theory, in which a particle's behavior is described through a statistically-interpreted wave function rather than through the concepts of Newtonian mechanics.