Real World Physics: From Amusement Parks to Race Cars

Assignments

Reading and response assignments

Week 1: Physics, the Human Adventure Ch. 6.1-6.5

Warm Up questions -- due via email by 5 pm on Wed Aug 30 

(Remember to treat this as a writing assignment, paying attention to grammatical issues and setting forth your thoughts logically and clearly.)

1. What does it mean for a rule to be deterministic? How does that help us in designing experiments and drawing conclusions from them?
2. Study Fig. 6.2 and Fig. 6.4. What are they telling you?  Talk about what quantities are on each axis and what the graph itself means.  Assuming that each graph is describing how someone was walking, explain their motion.

Week 3: Physics, the Human Adventure Ch. 9.2-9.5 and Ch 10 through (and including) 10.2

Warm Up questions -- due via email by 5 pm on Wed Sept. 13 

Do Problems 9.1 and 9.4.  (Remember to treat these as a writing assignment, paying attention to grammatical issues and setting forth your thoughts logically and clearly.)

Do the calculation in Problem 10.5, showing your work and what numbers you used.  You may want to hand this in on a separate sheet if that would be easier.

Week ??: Physics, the Human Adventure Ch. 17.1-17.6

Warm Up question -- is a detailed outline of the chapter 

Due by 5 pm on Mon. Sept 25.  You may turn it in on paper or via email, whichever you find easier. 

Required Events

For each of these that you attend, you need to write a one page paper about that event: what you heard/saw, what you learned, what the point of the event was and some personal evaluation of the event.

The point of requiring these activities is so that you learn about the variety of options available to you on campus.