COVID Notice:
Because nearly everything has to change to accomodate the needs of remote teaching and labs students who have had this course pre-COVID will remember different lab. For their benefit there is a pre-COVID Lab Page which will connect them to the labs they experienced. Someday these may come back.
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. These will include Jupyterlab and python notebook. We will build on previous work with notebooks and python coding. We will also be learning a markup language called LaTeX so that we can produce clean and professional looking reports with embedded math and graphics. If you are joining this class having had PH211 with a different instructor you will have some catch up work to do in this regard.
This Term:
The labs this term do not directly match with material we are doing in class. This is partly because electromagnetic labs tend to be finicky and unreliable or boring. By studying heat and sensors in the lab we will have more time to explore the more abstract material in the classroom.
