Recent content by Terry Bing

Thanks for the interesting info. This is useful. I'll check out the book by Schoenfeld. I am a mechanical engineering major. I had a short stint as a research scholar in a dept of theoretical physics, but I dropped out after two years. I currently coach students of my town for math and physics...

Thanks, I see your point. Will wait for it to be moved.

My apologies. I did look at various forums to decide where this belongs, but most of the threads on academic guidance forums seemed to be on courses and specific topics, and not studying in general. But now I see there are posts on 'learning' as well. I also wondered whether I should post it in...

Thanks. Just to be clear, I am not asking for shortcuts to study physics without any hard work. I am looking for tips for more efficient learning, which is why I gave the examples above. I have noticed that different students, who seem to put in the same amount of effort, end up with different...

I can find several resources (in this forum and elsewhere) on pedagogy and teaching tips that are geared towards teachers. Are there any books or resources that provides tips for students of physics, that would make learning more efficient and effective? Examples of the kind of things I am...

Thanks. I get that it matches the observed speed of sound. I am just curious as to why? Was there a way we could have guessed beforehand that it would work?

How do we know that this case satisfies that condition? Is there a practical limit below which a process can be reasonably assumed to be quasistatic? I have read that we can make the quasistatic approximation for expansion and compression processes, if the boundaries are moving much slower than...

The speed of sound in a gas at temperature T is given to be ## v=\sqrt{\frac{\gamma RT}{M}}##, where ##\gamma## is the adiabatic exponent, R is the gas constant and M is the molar mass of the gas. In deriving this expression, we assumed that the compression and expansion processes were so fast...

Thanks a lot. It is clear to me now.

I see. So if I assumed du and dv to be positive in the first two terms, then they must remain positive in the last term. So the negative sign remains negative. In general, if the numbers were different, and if I want to do it the first way, to find the maximum error, should I try different...

I am sorry, the question got posted before I could type it out completely. I have updated it.

If I write ##f=\frac{uv}{u+v}## and then take differentials on both sides, I get ##\frac{df}{f}=\frac{du}{u}+\frac{dv}{v}+\frac{du+dv}{u+v}##, I get the fractional error as 0.03. (I have replaced the negative signs that come as a result of quotient rule with positive signs, since we are asked to...

Ok. I'll avoid such questions in the future. Thanks for the help.

Thank you. That makes complete sense. Having a magnitude and direction is an intuitive way of thinking about certain vector quantities we encounter in high school physics, but is not the definition of a vector. And it isn't even the best way to describe vectors even in physics. How would you...

Ok. Thanks.