| Professor: | Henry Greenside | hsg@phy.duke.edu | 919-660-2548 | Room 097 |
| Teaching Assistant: | Marco Bertolini | mb266@phy.duke.edu | 919-667-7877 | Room 274C |
There will be three overlapping goals of the course. One will be to discuss some traditional thermodynamics, namely general powerful principles that relate work, heat, temperature, and entropy. Another goal will be to discuss some statistical physics, which concerns showing how macroscopic thermodynamic properties such as the specific heat or bulk modulus of some substance can be calculated in terms of the properties of the system's microscopic components. A third goal will be to discuss phase transitions: how an equilibrium phase may change into a new phase as some parameter such as temperature, pressure, chemical concentration, or magnetic field strength is varied.
Besides being fundamental to all areas of physics (and we will discuss applications to astrophysics, biophysics, environmental physics, material physics, and device physics), statistical physics has found diverse and useful applications outside of physics such as inventing optimization algorithms (e.g., simulated annealing for laying out wires of minimum length on a densely packed integrated circuit), explaining how animals flock without a leader, determining the minimum amount of power needed to run any computer, characterizing the correlated activity of highly interconnected neurons in brains, devising methods to deblur images when a lens is out of focus or when the imaged light has passed through some irregular medium, and understanding the extraordinary efficiency of the chemical-mechanical motors used by bacteria to rotate their flagella and to create ATP.
Note: The first class will be Thursday, January 13 and the last class will be Tuesday, April 26.
Although these prerequisites are within the range of some freshmen, Physics 363 is a challenging upper-level course that is not intended for freshmen, and the homeworks and exams in 363 assume a significant amount of scientific maturity and problem solving experience. Most 363 students have taken Physics 41 and 42 and some upper-level physics and mathematics courses such as Physics 143 and Math 103. If you are a freshman thinking about taking 363, please make an appointment to see me before taking the course, to make sure you will benefit from taking this course as a freshman.
| Course Component | Percent of Total Grade |
| Quizzes (about 6 in all) | 25% |
| Homeworks (about 10 in all) | 20% |
| Midterm | 20% |
| Final exam | 35% |
"Approximately" means that there is some flexibility on my part to take into account scores that may not be representative of your understanding, and to take into account information about your understanding as indicated by class participation or by discussions with me or with the TA outside of class.
Roughly every third lecture, there will be an in-class closed-book 15-minute quiz consisting of some true/false and multiple-choice questions and a few questions that require some calculation or verbal explanation. The quizzes should help you to keep up with the material by testing your basic knowledge and conceptual understanding. They should also help to prepare you for the kinds of questions that will appear on the midterm and final exam. The quizzes are not cumulative in that questions will emphasize material introduced after the previous quiz.
You will be able to drop one quiz grade over the semester, so you can either skip a quiz or just let the lowest grade be automatically ignored.
The quizzes will begin promptly at the beginning of class, do not be late.
These exams will be closed-book and scaled (grades will be adjusted according to how the class did overall). Questions will be a mix of true/false, multiple choice, and questions that require written solutions. The questions will be based mainly on examples worked in class, on quiz problems, and on homework problems. All relevant equations and data will be provided with the exams so you will not need to memorize such information. Instead, your goal during the exam will be to demonstrate your conceptual and technical understanding of key topics.
There will be a homework assignment about once per week and typically due one week after being made available on the course web page. The assignments must be handed in no later than the beginning of class on the due date. (This is to discourage students from missing a class to finish an assignment.)
Assignments will vary between four to eight hours to complete so some will be too long to finish in one evening. Given this, please start working on each assignment a few days before it is due. Starting early will also give you time to meet with me, with the TA, or with your classmates if you need some help.
You will be able to drop one assignment from your grade over the semester. Either don't do one of the assignments or just let your lowest homework grade be automatically ignored.
Late homeworks are not accepted. If you think you will not be able to hand in your homework by its due date, please get in touch with me or with the TA as soon as possible---at least three days before the due date---and explain what is the situation. While I will be able to give you an extension for most reasonable excuses, an extension is not automatic. Please be familiar with the information on the Duke webpage about Class Attendance and Missed Work.
Only some homework problems will be graded for each assignment, since it will not be practical for the grader to grade all the problems of all the students. Although not all problems will be graded, you should try to do all of them since you will learn the material more thoroughly, and since some of the quiz and exam problems will be based on homework problems. Answers will be provided for each assignment after its due date.
It is possible to use the Internet to find answers to problems in most undergraduate physics textbooks, including the Schroeder text. Please resist the temptation to use such solutions when working on and writing up your homework. You will learn much more if you struggle creatively to solve the problems on your own or by discussing them with your classmates or with me. Also keep in mind that 80% of your course grade will be based on quizzes, the midterm, and final exam for which you will not have access to the Internet or to a computer.
You are allowed to collaborate with your classmates on an assignment. (This is realistic, scientists collaborate all the time in research.) However, you must write up your homework on your own, in your own words, and with your own understanding. You must also acknowledge explicitly at the beginning of your homework anyone who gave you substantial help, e.g. classmates or the TA or myself. (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 and failure to acknowledge help when given may lead to severe academic penalties so please play by the rules.
When writing up your assignments, please be clear and demonstrate insight. Writing clearly means using readable handwriting (no tiny or crowded script) and logical presentation of your thoughts. You should strive to use proper grammar, correct spelling, and good sentence structure. For questions that require a mathematical answer, show your work clearly. 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 for you to solve and write up your answers, and compared to the time for the TA and myself to read and grade your homeworks. You will get partial or no credit if the TA or myself can not easily read your answers.
Demonstrating insight means using complete sentences or detailed phrases that explain what you are doing and why. Cryptic brief answers like "yes", "no", or "4π" will not be given credit. Your written answers must show 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 quizzes, midterm and final exam. Writing clearly is also one of the most valuable skills you can develop at Duke.
When writing your homework assignments, please pay attention to details. All symbols should be given names the first time you introduce them. For example, you should say "the temperature T" or "the angle θ" instead of just using the symbols T and θ. Physical units should be given for any answer that is a physical quantity. For example, you should say "the distance was d=0.02 km", "the angle was a=32 degrees", or "the temperature T had the value 6000 K". Graphs should be carefully drawn and have their axes clearly labeled with the quantities being plotted and with the physical units of the quantities. Although it is fine to produce plots using Mathematica, if you do so please include the Mathematica code that you used to generate your plots.
Numbers obtained from Mathematica or from a calculator should be rounded to the appropriate number of significant digits, typically two or fewer for this course unless otherwise indicated. Thus if you obtain an answer 7.48752103E-03 that was obtained by combining numbers that just had two significant digits each, you should write this down in your homework, quiz, or exam as 7.5×10-3.
| Jan 13, Thursday | First class | |
| Jan 26, Wednesday | Drop/Add ends at 5 PM | |
| Feb 8 Thursday | Quiz 2 | |
| Feb 22 Thursday | Quiz 3 | |
| Mar 3, Thursday | Midterm exam | |
| Mar 9, Tuesday | No class, spring break | |
| Mar 11, Thursday | No class, spring break | |
| Mar 24, Thursday | Quiz 4 | |
| Apr 7, Thursday | Quiz 5 | |
| Apr 26, Tuesday | Last class of semester | |
| May 4, Wednesday | Final exam, 7-10 PM |
Feel free to send me an email at any time. I do read and reply to email during evenings and weekends.
If you are in the Physics building, please drop by my office Physics 097 to chat. I would greatly enjoy the chance to meet with you outside of class.
There are two online undergraduate books of possible interest:
Finally, an excellent pedagogical book that complements much of this course is Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach by Donald McQuarrie and John Simon. This book has especially nice discussions of the connection of thermal physics to spectroscopy and chemical bonds and many worked examples.
