Text: How Things Work (Louis Bloomfield)

Supplementary sources:
The Way Things Work (David Macaulay)
Bloomfield's site
LAB supplementary site with cases
A nice explain-the-gadget site
Lots of similar lectures
Miscellany of applets and such
Somewhat fancier applets
Talk show clips of physics demos
And there's always the tried and true wikipedia.org

All exams: 3-4 problems. You'll need paper and writing sticks and you may use approved calculators (not needed usually)
Grades: approximately 25% hw problems, 40% midterm exams, 35% final

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week

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Main themes covered in lectures 

problems due 9am Friday 

Aug 23 

Rules, Inertia and motion, and Newton's laws 

pdf 6 slides per page, HTML-ized

 

 

Weight, Projectiles, Friction, Conservation laws

pdf 6 slides per page, HTML-ized

Aug 28

Seesaws and can-openers

pdf 6 slides per page, HTML-ized

ˆ

 

 

Torques, rotations,

First HW

Sept 4 

How much do you weigh? Home runs, fair rides

pdf 6 slides per page, HTML-ized

 

 

Hooke's law, collisions, vibration harmonics

pdf 6 slides per page, HTML-ized

Sept 11 

Bicycles, Space ships

pdf 6 slides per page, HTML-ized

 

 

Equilibrium, gravity, orbits

Second HW

Sept 18 

5, 6 

Balloons, Water flow, Airplanes

pdf 6 slides per page, HTML-ized

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Thermodynamics and hydrodynamics

pdf 6 slides per page, html

Sept 25 

7, 8

How to heat your home (and Orange County)

pdf 6 slides per page, html

 

 

Heat, engines, entropy, phase transitions

HawCheng Lecture

Sept 27

 

Exam on Chapters 1-4

 

Oct 2 

8

Home heating and energy efficiency

pdf 6 slides per page, html

 

 

An energy plan for the future

Third HW (DUE 10/9)

Oct 9 

9

Clocks, Violins

pdf 6 slides per page, html

 

 

oscillations, resonance, harmonics

pdf 6 slides per page, html

Oct 16 

Fall Break == no class Friday 

 

 


Oct 25

 

Exam on Chapters 5-8

 

Oct 23 

9

Tides and Waves

pdf 6 slides per page, html

 

 

Interference, Diffraction and all that

Oct 30 

10

Flashlights and Photocopiers

pdf 6 slides per page, html

 

 

Charge, voltage, current, Coulmb's Law, circuits

pdf 6 slides per page, html

Nov 6 

11, 12

Microwave Ovens and Radios

Fourth HW (DUE 11/13)

 

13  

E&M waves, AM, FM, oscillations of molecules

pdf 6 slides per page, html

Nov 13 

14

Rainbows, Lasers, LEDs

 

 

Refraction, dispersion, optical transitions

Nov 20

 

Exam:  9-13

 

Nov 20 

15

Thanksgiving == no class Wednesday & Friday  

Thanksgiving 

ˆ

 

 

Nov 27 

15

Cameras & Televisions

pdf 6 slides per page, html

 

 

lenses, CCDs

Dec 4 

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16

Medical imaging, Cat Scans, MRI

 

 

Nuclear weapons, Reviews

pdf 6 slides per page, html 

Dec 9

Final Exam, 8am

 

Electronic version (and updates) available from http://www.physics.unc.edu/~sean/Phys100/syllabus.html