Physics 3368:


Astrophysics & Cosmology

Fall 2000

Instructor: Professor Fredrick Olness
Office: Room 103A, Fondren Hall
Telephone: 768-2500 or 768-2495
Office Hours: As posted, and by appointment

Office Hours Office Hours: As posted, and by appointment. Additionally, graduate students are available to answer your questions.

Review: *** TO BE DETERMINED ***

Text:

Grading: The final course grade will be determined as follows. Exams 50%, Final 25%, Homework 25%.

Homework: Physics is not a spectator sport! Homework is assigned for each chapter. The homework will be due every TUESDAY. It will be graded on a Pass/Fail basis to verify that you are keeping up the the material. I encourage you to work in a study group and to use my office hours if you have difficulty. (Note, I do not need to grade the homework rigorously since it will be obvious from the quiz grades who is doing the work.)

Solutions: As a convenience to you, I provide my personal notes on the homework to assist you in solving the problems. I caution you that these notes have errrrors, and you should keep this in mind when you use them.

I remind you that most of the quiz and exam problems are directly from the homework. I provide solutions to the homework as a convenience to help you when you get stuck. You will find (if you have not discovered already) that it is not sufficient to simply read through my homework solution to understand the material. It is necessary to struggle with the ideas, and learn for yourself how to solve the different types of problems.

Consider the following analogy: If I ask you to drive to my house, you would have significant difficulty because you would not know the proper direction to travel, or the proper turns to make. But, if I told you to follow me home, it would be trivial.

The same applies to the homework. It is trivial to follow me as I take you through the problems and the examples. But when you are on your own and I am not telling you what direction to go and you can not peek at the homework solutions, it is far from trivial.

In looking through the homework that is turned in, I can see when people are simply just following me, and when they are doing it on their own. (This becomes more obvious as we get into more difficult problems.)

I encourage you to use the homework solutions as a tool; but, it is not a substitute for you working out the solutions on your own. It takes me 2-3 hours to do a chapter of homework. I expect it should take you 2-3 times as long. (Maybe less, if you work in a group.) If you are willing to put in the time, I can assure you of a good grade. If not, I can assure you of what you earn. If you think you are close to understanding the material, but need just a little more work, then come and see me during my office hours.

The goal of this course, beyond physics, is to give you the ability to approach complex problems, identify the important parts, ignore the irrelevant parts, and obtain a solution. Whether you become a physicist, engineer, doctor, scientist, lawyer, architect, business executive, or whatever, your ability to deal with complex abstract problems will always be an asset.