Welcome
Time and Place
Prerequisites
What You Need
Class Policy
Weekly Reading
Grading
Exams
Homeworks
How to Write Homeworks
Getting Help
Important Dates
763 Home Page
Duke Gradescope
Useful
links
Department of Physics
Welcome:
Welcome to Physics 763, which is a core
graduate physics course about statistical physics. This subject
concerns emergence, which is understanding how properties of
macroscopic systems that consist of many microscopic objects (where
"many" often means of order Avogadro's number, about 1024)
emerge from and are related to the properties of the microscopic
objects. Statistical physics mainly discusses macroscopic systems that
are in or close to thermodynamic equilibrium, while other branches of
emergent physics concern nonequilibrium phenomena like nonlinear
dynamics, fluid dynamics, plasma physics, astrophysics, and
biophysics. Statistical physics is broadly applicable and useful for
many areas of physics and, perhaps surprisingly, also for many
subjects outside of physics such as chemistry, biology, engineering,
mathematics, statistics, and computer science (machine learning).
Time and Place
Because of the Covid-19 virus, the 763 class will be taught online via
Zoom this fall semester of 2020.
Classes will be held live on Mondays and Wednesday from
10:15–11:30 am. Recordings of each class will be posted on
the 763 Sakai website.
Prerequisites:
The requirements for Physics 763 is that you already know three
physics subjects at the undergraduate level corresponding to Duke's
undergraduate courses
Physics 361 (classical
mechanics),
Physics 363 (statistical physics),
and
Physics 464 (quantum mechanics).
If you are not sure whether you satisfy these prerequisites, please
email Prof. Greenside as soon as possible, preferably no later
than the end of the first week of the semester.
If you have not learned about statistical physics previously, you
should consider taking the undergraduate thermal physics course
Physics 363 or the related physical chemistry course
Chemistry 311 instead of 763. There are also several online video
lecture courses on statistical physics, see the webpage
763-related
links.
What You Need:
- There is no required textbook. Weekly reading will be based on
some books that are available for free on the Internet (mainly from
the second edition of the
book
Statistical Physics by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz), on some
book chapters posted on the 763 Sakai webpage, and on some journal
articles also posted on the course Sakai website.
Because Physics 763 assumes that you are already familiar with and
have mastered key concepts of statistical physics at the undergraduate
level, you should own a hard copy of an undergraduate textbook on
statistical physics so that you can review basic concepts and examples
as needed. One textbook used in many American undergraduate stat mech
courses is "Thermal Physics" by Daniel Schroeder. Some other books are
listed in
the 763
links webpage.
- Because teaching and discussions will be done online and because
homeworks will be uploaded and graded as electronic files, it will be
greatly helpful if you have a tablet and digital stylus that can
connect to Zoom so that you can write and draw information to share
with the instructor or with the teaching assistant. An older 12.9"
iPad Pro with 32 GB or more of RAM and an Apple Pencil will be
fine.
- A computer with access to the Internet and a modern browser
like Google Chrome
or Mozilla
Firefox. You will need to access email,
the 763 webpage, the
Duke Sakai website, and
the
course Piazza
website.
Your computer should have a webcam and microphone so that you can
participate in the class Zoom sessions and have one-on-one Zoom
sessions with Professor Greenside and with the TA.
- The Mathematica
program installed on your computer. Homework assignments will
occasionally require you to execute, or to make some modest changes
to and then execute, previously written Mathematica
notebooks. Information about how to do this will be provided during
the semester. As a Duke student, you can download and install a free
copy of Mathematica from the
OIT
software licensing webpage.
Class Policy
Weekly Reading
The reading for each week will be posted on Piazza about a week before
the material is discussed in class.
Please read the assigned material actively. This means that, as
you read, you should have a pen or pencil with lots of blank paper
available (or a stylus and tablet with a note-taking app) so that you
can work through various derivations, take notes of key points, and
keep a list of questions that you can ask in class, post
on Piazza,
or review in preparation for the midterm and final exams. Discussing
the material with some classmates is another good way to think
actively and critically about the material.
Reading the assigned material is a required and important part of this
course since there will not be enough time during classes to discuss
all the details that you need to know and understand. You should also
do as much of the assigned reading before the class that discusses
that material so that you get the most out of each class.
If you have questions about the assigned reading, please post your
questions on Piazza (anonymously if you like) so that other members of
the class, the TA, or the instructor can help you.
Grading
Midterm and Final Exams
The midterm and final exams will be open-book and taken outside of
class times. The midterm will cover material since the beginning of
the course while the final exam will be cumulative in that it will
cover material from the entire semester, although with an emphasis on
material covered since the midterm.
During these exams, you can use your notes, the online lectures, and
your textbooks but you cannot use the Internet to look for
solutions and you cannot talk to anyone to get help with the exam.
While you are taking the exam, you can send an email to Professor
Greenside and ask for clarification about the meaning of an exam
question, but Professor Greenside might not be immediately available
depending on when you take the exam.
You will get an email regarding when an exam is ready for you to
download from Gradescope. After getting this email, you will be able
to download a copy of the exam during a given window of time. You will
then have a fixed amount of time to complete the exam. Before your
allotted time finishes, you will need to upload an electronic copy of
back to Gradescope.
If you feel that a question on an exam was not graded correctly,
please request a regrade by emailing Professor Greenside what problem
(or problems) you think were not graded correctly and why.
Homework Assignments
There will be about 8-9 homework assignments over the 13-week semester
so about one assignment every 1.5 weeks. You will hand in your
homeworks electronically by uploading scanned pages to the 763
Gradescope webpage. The TA will then grade your uploaded homework
using Gradescope, after which you will able to get your scores and
read the TAs comments on Gradescope.
Because there will be typically 4-6 substantial problems per
assignment, the length of an assignment can exceed 10 pages, and there
will be about 17~homeworks for the TA to grade for each assignment,
the TA will not have the time to grade each homework problem
carefully. Instead, the TA will grade just a few (typically 2-4)
problems per assignment carefully for correctness (you will not know
in advance which problems will be graded carefully) and grade the rest
of the problems just on whether you wrote up the answers and the
answers were reasonable, right or wrong.
If your homework not easy to read or was not scanned with good
quality, I have asked the TA to reject your assignment and ask that
you to submit it again in an acceptable form.
You can create your homework PDF files in two ways:
- Write out your homework electronically using a tablet and stylus,
say using an application like Notability or GoodNotes for the iPad or
LectureNotes for Android tablets. Then save your homework as a PDF
file.
- Write out your homework by hand on paper and then scan your
homework pages into a single PDF file using the camera on your
cellphone or tablet by using a free scanning app such as
Adobe Scan which is available on Apple and Android cell phones and
tablets.
When you scan the pages using your cellphone or tablet,
please please use the mode called "black and white", "text", or
"whiteboard" depending on your app. Two-bit black-and white modes
produce a much easier to read output because all text and drawings are
black and white, not gray or color. Also the texture of the paper is
ignored.
Please note that:
- Please start on your assignment at least a few days before it
is due. Since the assignments can take up to eight hours per week
to complete, starting your assignment a day or two before its due date
will not leave you enough time to think creatively or productively
about the material or to get help if you need help.
If an assignment takes more than about eight hours, something has gone
wrong so please post a message on Piazza (anonymously if you like)
that the assignment is too long. Professor Greenside can then email
the class about how to reduce the duration of the assignment, e.g., by
dropping parts of a problem or an entire problem.
- Late homeworks are not accepted without an excuse that is
approved by Professor Greenside at least 48 hours before the
homework's due date. Examples of acceptable excuses are conflicting
religious holidays, illness, travel related to your being a graduate
student (attending a conference, doing research at a government
lab), or travel because of some personal reason like a crisis in
your family. Requesting an extension because you did not manage your
time well is not an acceptable excuse. Please see this Duke webpage
about
Missing Work/Classes.
- Please put your name, the date, the homework number (like
HW1) and the course number 763 on the top of the first page of your
assignments.
- You are not allowed to get homework answers from other people
or from the Internet. Using answers that are not your own is
cheating which has serious consequences at Duke. In turn, you are not
allowed to give answers to your classmates (including not posting
solutions on Piazza). If a classmate asks for help, please give just a
hint about what to try, or work out a separate but related
problem. You will learn much more if you struggle creatively to solve
the problems on your own. If you do need some help, post a question on
Piazza, discuss your question with a classmate, or meet via Zoom with
Professor Greenside or with the TA.
- You must write up your homework on your own, in your own
words, and with your own understanding. You are allowed to
collaborate with your classmates on an assignment, and Professor
Greenside officially encourages collaboration. (This is realistic,
scientists collaborate all the time in research.) However, please
acknowledge explicitly in writing at the beginning of your assignment
anyone who gave you substantial help, e.g. classmates, Professor
Greenside, or the TA. (Again, scientists usually acknowledge in their
published articles colleagues that helped in completing some
particular research.) Failure to write your homeworks in your own
words (especially copying answers from a classmate or from a
downloaded answer book) or failure to acknowledge help when given may
lead to academic penalties so please play by the rules.
How to Write Your Homeworks
When writing your homeworks, please pay attention to details that
improve the quality of your writing:
- Write clearly. Writing clearly means using readable
handwriting (no tiny or crowded script) and presenting your thoughts
logically. You should strive to use proper grammar, correct spelling,
and good sentence structure. For questions that require a symbolic
answer, explain clearly how you obtained the answer, showing necessary
steps with some brief phrases of explanation. Use plenty of space
between symbols, and use blank lines to separate successive lines of
equations. Keep in mind that paper is cheap compared to the time it
takes you to solve and write up your answers, and compared to the time
for the TA to read and grade your homeworks. You will get
partial or no credit if the TA or Professor Greenside can not
easily understand your answers.
- Write with insight. This means using sentences or phrases
that explain and justify what you are doing; brief answers like "yes",
"no", or "K q/(κ r2)" will not be given
credit. Your written answers must be detailed enough to show us that
that you understand how you got your answer and that you appreciate
the significance of your answer. A simple criterion for a well-written
answer is that you will be able to understand the answer yourself
several weeks after you have written your answer, even without
remembering what the original question was. Writing clearly especially
pays off when it comes time for you to review your assignments in
preparation for the midterm and final exam. Writing clearly is also
one of the most valuable skills you can develop as a graduate student
since you will be publishing papers and writing proposals later on as
a professional scientist..
- The first time you introduce a symbol in your homework, please
describe the symbol with a verbal name and give its physical
units. For example, you should say "the absolute
temperature T in kelvin", "the number
concentration n(x,t) in molecules/m3", and "the
diffusion constant D in m2/s" instead of just
writing the symbols T, n, and D. This makes
it clear that you know what you are talking about.
- Physical units must be included with any numerical answer that
corresponds to a physical quantity. For example, you should say "the
length was d=2.4 m", "the angle was
a=0.2 rad", or "the magnetic field strength B had
the value 2.3 T". In SI units, unit names like newton and tesla
are not capitalized, while their abbreviated symbols like N
and T are capitalized.
- If not created using Mathematica or a similar program, graphs
should be carefully drawn, numerical values for tick marks should be
given, and you should give the symbols and their physical units for
quantities associated with the horizontal and vertical axes. There
should be a brief title or figure caption that describes what the
graph is intended to illustrate, e.g., the title
"magnetization M in A/m", versus "magnetic field
magnitude B in tesla".
- Please write down all scientific numbers with the appropriate
number of significant digits. Numbers obtained from a calculator or
from a program like Mathematica should be rounded to the appropriate
number of significant digits. (See any introductory college physics
textbook for a brief discussion regarding significant digits.) For
this course, two or fewer digits will suffice for most answers, and,
in many cases, you will only be required to estimate some value to
the nearest power of ten (no significant digits). Thus if you obtain
on your calculator the result 7.38752103E-03, you should write this
answer in your homework as 7×10-3 to one
significant digit or as 10-2 to zero significant
digits. You will lose points if you give too many significant digits
in your homeworks and exams.
Also, please write all numbers using the standard scientific
notation with powers of ten such as 7×10-3. Do not
write down numbers using the notation often used with calculators
like this: 7E-3.
Getting Help
- Use Piazza
Questions about the course should first
be posted to the Physics
763
Piazza webpage. (Please do not email such questions to Professor
Greenside or the TA directly.) Piazza is an elegant web-based forum
that allows members of a class to ask and answer questions. The main
two benefits for you in using Piazza is that you can get rapid
feedback (especially during evenings and weekends), and you will
benefit when other members of the class ask questions and get answers
via Piazza. Here some suggestions about using Piazza:
- Do not be shy in asking questions about any part of the
course. With Piazza, you can ask questions anonymously and please do
so if this will encourage you to ask a question. (It is much better
for you to ask than to be frustrated.) When someone submits an
anonymous question on Piazza, not even the instructor or TA knows
who asked the question.
- You will get the most help on Piazza if you ask something
specific and include some details. Don't say something like "I am
stuck with homework problem 3.1", say something like "Part (b) of
problem 3.1 asks me to do the following, and I get to this
particular point in the answer and then I am not sure what to
do."
- Please be polite and respectful in any reply you post.
-
The only questions not appropriate for Piazza would be personal
ones, such as questions about your scores and grades, or what to do
if you will miss a class or exam because of illness or travel. For
these questions, please contact Professor Greenside directly.
- Use Zoom
Professor Greenside and the TA are glad to
meet with you via Zoom if you have any questions about the course
material. You can arrange a Zoom meeting or phone call with
Prof. Greenside by sending him an email
to hsg@phy.duke.edu, and you
can arrange a meeting with the TA Xiaoxuan Jian by sending her an
email
at xiaoxuan.jian@duke.edu.
If somehow you fall behind or if you are finding the course more
challenging than you had anticipated, please meet with Professor
Greenside as soon as possible so that he can find ways to help you.
Important Dates
Aug 17, Mon |
|
First class |
Aug 28, Fri |
|
Drop/Add ends at 5 PM |
Week of September 28 (after the Wed Sep 30 class) |
|
Take-home midterm exam |
Nov 16, Mon |
|
Last class |
Week of Nov 23 |
|
Take-home final exam |
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