Recent content by Scott Hill

I'm thinking of using the OpenStax College Physics text for my algebra-based college physics class this fall. The few mentions I've seen here of the book are lukewarm, though, but I wanted to ask for a general discussion. How does the book compare to something like Serway or Knight? What's...

Thanks for the suggestion. Some concrete examples (if they exist) would be helpful though. It's easy to offer Engineering Physics when you already have an engineering program, but I'm wondering if anyone is managing it without one.

Is anyone aware of a liberal arts college (or other such school) that offers Engineering Physics without having a full-blown Engineering program? I'm a physics professor at a small school and we're investigating the feasibility of adding such a program ourselves; it would be useful to see some...

Thank you for the responses, and apologies for the late reply. (Semester finally ended.) I got a copy of Hayes and Horowitz (the lab manual connected to H&H), but I found it rather difficult going: I think it leaves a lot unsaid, and would be difficult for a first-time electronics student to...

Next fall I will be teaching an electronics class for the first time, for undergraduate physics majors (who have already taken introductory E&M and integral calculus, not necessarily PDEs). The catalog description is "An introduction to analog and digital electronics. Topics include DC and AC...

Boas is a great reference book, but I taught from it once and my students found it difficult to learn from. (My plan was for them to read each chapter, and send me specific topics that confused them, which I would discuss in class. This is not the book to do that with, in my opinion, though of...

Ah good, that's what I was thinking. But in *practice* we can just assume that it's the energy expectation value of the system that's conserved, and that measurement can exchange energy with the system. Great! It's funny the questions that only occur to me once I have to teach a subject. :)

OK, I've got it I think. It reminded me of the classic entanglement problem where an atom emits two circularly-polarized photons in opposite directions: angular momentum conservation forces the two particles to have opposite polarizations. I think there's still an "entanglement" argument to be...

OK. Collapsing the wavefunction can cause a dramatic change in the expectation value of the energy, though; how is that energy accounted for? Thanks.

A particle in a quantum harmonic oscillator can be in a superposition of energy eigenstates, and so the energy is not well-defined. However, energy is still conserved, so if I understand it correctly the "uncertainty" in the superposition's energy must be matched by uncertainty elsewhere in the...

Yes, I will be spending my Christmas vacation boning up on Quantum I, so that I'm at least at the same starting point they are. :)

This is the last quantum mechanics class they will take before they graduate, if that helps. Differential equations and linear algebra are prerequisites. The catalog description is "Formalism and applications of quantum mechanics: Hilbert space, time-independent and time-dependent perturbation...

It's probably too late to swap textbooks, but I'll get a copy for my own reference at least. Thanks!

Frankly, I'm intimidated by this course. I've never taught quantum mechanics before, haven't even thought about Schrodinger's equation much in the past decade, and it's all something of a blur. With a textbook I'll be fine, but I don't have a good enough feel for the subject to say "Oh yes, I...

They've had a one-year Modern Physics course out of Krane.