Welcome to PHYS 3310. Waves are ubiquitous and the principal manner by
which we receive information about the physical world around us and by
which we communicate with human beings. Understanding waves is
essential to understanding the physical universe. You have already
learned some wave physics in your previous courses but here we will
study them systematically with an eye to learning the most general
principles governing their behavior.
A vastly important property of the physical universe is that physics laws appear the same to a careful observer in any uniformly moving reference frame. This has surprising, even startling, consequences which we will learn when we study the "special" theory of relativity in the second portion of the course.
Graded homework will typically be issued weekly. I encourage you to work together on the problems since discussion aids comprehension. However, the final write-up must be your own work. Submitted homework assignments that are suspiciously similar will annoy me. There will be 3 regular take-home tests as well as a comprehensive final exam.
Your final grade will be based on a weighted sum of your performance
on homework, tests, and the final exam according to the scheme
below. Individual assignments do not receive a letter grade. The
assignments weights are: