Veritas, Formositas et Instrumenta Potentia
Announcements (most recent items at the top)
Note: Links to the "physics" or "internal" directories can only be accessed from Olin or via VPN.Monday, December 15
- Physics: Final is due at noon. It can be found here; it may take you up to 3.5 hours.
Monday, December 8
- Physics: Correction to the Crab nebula pulsar problem. The time derivative given in last week's assignment was inadvertently incorrect by a mere 24 orders of magnitude - the problem now has the correct value, and the solution can be found here
- Physics: Read Ch 9 through 9-4. No WebAssign problems today.
- Physics homework due: Ch 14: 12, 20, 32, 40, 52, 54; Ch 15: 30, 32, 42, 68, 74
- Physics practice final: you might want to try the 5 cumulative problems on p.360 and the 5 cumulative problems on p. 568 (especially 1, 3 and 5 - we skipped some definitions in Ch 19 that you need to complete 2 and 4, but you should be able to read that material if you want to try those, too).
Wednesday, December 3
- Physics: Read Ch 15 and do WebAssign problems
Monday, December 1
- Physics: Read Ch 14 and do WebAssign problems
- Physics homework due: Ch 13: 14, 28, 33, 39, 40, 56, 62, 65 and the Crab nebula problem: the pulsar in the Crab nebula is a neutron star with mass 2.8x1030 kg and radius 10 km, which is currently rotating with a period of about 30 ms. It has been slowing down since being born with a much shorter period, where the rate at which rotational kinetic energy decreases is proportional to the inverse fourth power of the period. You know one more thing: that the current dimensionless value of the time derivative of the period is measured to be 5x10-13. From this information (some of which is not necessary to complete this problem), can you deduce that the supernova that created the neutron star happened about 1000 years ago?