Part IB Advanced Physics Course



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Comments on how the 1999 course differed from what went before

Themes throughout the course

  • Dimensional analysis. Estimation.
  • Conservation laws.
  • Matrices. `Everything is a spring'.
  • Successive approximation and perturbation expansions.

The main proposed changes compared with the 1998 course are

  1. Lagrangian and Hamiltonian dynamics introduced, gently.
  2. Normal modes are put first, rotating frames and rotating bodies later.
  3. Coverage of elasticity is reduced. No cantilevers.
  4. Coverage of rigid bodies is reduced. Only qualitative treatment of free precession. Possibly no Euler equations.


Site last modified Wed Aug 17 16:39:36 BST 2005