Welcome to PHY 113 – Classical Mechanics!
This site connects you to all the resources I make available throughout the course. You can use the sidebar to access the syllabus, the course schedule, online homework, score reports, and so on.
For information about how to contact me, my office and so on, you can go to my info page here or look at the course syllabus.
The summer class just covered gravitational potential energy (GPE) and it’s fun to think of ways that GPE is pragmatically useful. Hydroelectric power is in part a way to harness GPE by taking a mass of water that is higher up (behind a dam) and then, in a controlled way, releasing GPE by allowing the water through to lower elevations.
GPE is also being explored as a store of energy when wind and solar energy exceed demand. You see, wind and solar power often go beyond what people need at certain times during a day, and then they end up supplying too little at other times of day (i.e. solar doesn’t produce energy at night). One obvious approach is to develop battery technology that can soak up the excess energy production and then release it back to the energy grid when other power sources are undersupplying. The problem is that we don’t know how to make batteries dense and efficient enough to solve the problem, so people are exploring alternatives, one of which is to use the extra energy to lift very heavy weights high up in the air, which can then be lowered in a manner that causes a generator to turn, thus siphoning off (some of) the GPE back into electrical power. Here’s an article describing some recent work on this:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a40241329/gravity-energy/
I’m excited to start our summer course on mechanics!
Summer session is a whirlwind as we pack a full semester of physics into approximately 5 weeks. Our class will function mainly in a traditional manner, but I learned a couple of things from teaching during COVID that I intend to continue to incorporate into how the class will work. Among these are recordings of all of our meetings, easy access to slides and notes, and some Zoom-based components of the course that I used to run face-to-face but are much easier to do remotely.
Please take a look at the syllabus, which is linked to on the sidebar of this site.
You can find some basic information (my contact info and the lab TA information) by clicking on the “Welcome!” link on the upper-right or following the link below:
https://phy111113.sites.umassd.edu/welcome-to-classical-mechanics/
Due to the campus staying closed until 10 am tomorrow (2/25) we will postpone the quiz until Monday (2/28).
To make up for lost time I will be posting some videos covering material I would have covered in lecture on Monday. I’ll send out an announcement when the videos are ready to be viewed.
Keep warm and stay safe! Enjoy the extra morning time.
Welcome to our Spring 2022 Classical Mechanics course.
You can find essential information by clicking on “Syllabus” and “Lecture Schedule” on the sidebar.
Feel free to email me with any questions you may have. You can find my contact info by clicking on the button at the upper-right of the site that says “Contact Info”.
Looking forward to seeing you in class!
I’m excited to start our summer course on mechanics! And I’m extra excited to be able to do so in person!
The summer session is always a whirlwind as we pack a full semester of physics into an approximately 5 week period. I’m hoping to utilize some of the material developed for remote learning this past year to help you manage this time a bit more flexibly. We’ll begin our first session with some introduction to various components of the course as well as some discussion of how to make the course work best for you.
Please take a look at the syllabus, which is linked to on the sidebar of this site.
You can find some basic information (my contact info and the lab TA information) by clicking on the “Welcome!” link on the upper-right or following the link below:
https://phy111113.sites.umassd.edu/welcome-to-classical-mechanics/
Welcome to Classical Physics 1! The main focus of this course is the theory of classical mechanics that was first brought to mature form by Isaac Newton. I take a somewhat non-standard approach with a heavy emphasis on the concepts of momentum and energy, but at the end of the day, it’s all the normal stuff (forces, motion, baby Yoda…)
This site is the primary place to come for course resources. You’ll find links to the syllabus, the schedule, and the online homework system via the sidebar.
The course lecture schedule will gradually be populated with links for our Zoom sessions.
Note that for the online setting, I will divide the class into smaller groups of about 20 students each. These groups will normally meet once a week on a particular day (Monday, Wednesday, or Friday). The main lecture content is embedded with the online problem sets and our live meetings will be in the form of tutorials. These are a sort-of hybrid between lectures, recitations, and quiz sessions, sometimes they will be more of one, sometimes more of the other. The key to getting the most out of this course is to come prepared to the tutorial meetings. Typically this means that you have watched the lecture videos for that week and have attempted at least some of the problem set problems. Sometimes, there will be something different or extra that I assign to you. The smaller group size means that we will be able to be far more interactive, particularly in the online situation.
Please be on the look out for more information and don’t hesitate to email me if you have questions. My email is dkagan and the domain is umassd.edu.
Hello everyone!
I’m very excited to get our class going this summer. As you can see from the summer schedule, we are covering a normal semester’s worth of course material in the span of 5 weeks (less actually) so things will be intense! On top of that, we are doing this online. While I gained some experience running the last third of my course last semester, I expect that I have stuff to learn about the best way to run things.
Please take a few minutes to watch this introductory video to the course. It covers:
Don’t miss the video underneath as well that delves a bit into the course’s main topics and some aspects of how I grade.
Course Introduction:
Course Topics and Some Aspects of Grading