Labs: Why?

At its root science is an empirical (meaning experimental) discipline. This means that all the ideas of science are based on experiments and the data that comes from those experiments. Because doing experiments is so important to the process of science we spend as much time in the lab learning about doing experiments as we do in "class" trying to understand the ideas that try to create a reasonable explanation for all the data.

The second important function of labs is development of communication skills in the context of science. There are several parts of this that are important to me but being able to coherently and effectively explain a process or application of an idea is one. Another value in this process is that writing uses a different part of your brain to process the ideas and helps you make sense of ideas differently than merely reading about them.

Modeling:

You may be used to "confirmation labs" where you verify results that you have discussed in class. While there will be some affirmation of the concepts we have discussed in class we will also be learning a variety of new tools to explore more complex physics problems than we can do analytically. Our tools will be python (a coding language) and markdown (a lite version of LaTeX) in a JupyterLab notebook. All of this will be painful at first but will have long term benefits for most of you.

The Red Rule:

Material above the red rule has been prepped for remote learning

Material below the red rule is still under development