Recent content by vela

I think so too. There's some overlap, but there can still be a pretty big gap between the two majors. To properly prepare for physics grad school, I had to go back and earn a BS Physics.

Is PF a link-heavy site? In my brief look at a number of sites the other day, I noticed most sites don't underline every link, but they do for links in a block of text where the visual indicators help them stand out from the surrounding text. @Dale, does the underlining on a site like Ars...

Kagi search results, on the other hand, do have underlined links. So do the sites for the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. That doesn't seem too surprising because newspapers probably prioritize making their sites accessible. I just checked a number...

Then I think it would help, as @robphy suggested above, if you could give us an example of a roadblock you're running into. Maybe you just need a quick review of a few chapters in Fundamentals of Physics II.

It is. My point was that if same spin meant both spin-up or both spin-down, it would correspond to only two of the triplet states and the solution wouldn't have admitted all three states and a threefold degeneracy.

The same thought occurred to me; however, the solution explicitly lists all three of the triplet states and claims there's a threefold degeneracy of the ground state. It's clearly admitting the possibility of the two electrons having opposite spin.

I don't get it either. I think he's wrong, but the same text is in the second edition. I would think that an obvious error like that would have been caught and corrected already, so perhaps we're both missing something here. I had the same thoughts reading through his solution. It seems he...

Isn't the complex logarithm traditionally denoted ##\log##, not ##\ln##? I noticed in a couple of places you used principle where you meant principal.

Here are two free-body diagrams of the scale. One for your scenario (left) and one for the scale suspended from the ceiling (right). As you said, the scale hanging from the ceiling will read 10 kg or 100 N.

Is Griffiths your first exposure to quantum mechanics? If so, you might consider working through the chapters on modern physics in an introductory physics book. Or get a book on modern physics, like Tipler. I don't think you'll find any popularizations of quantum mechanics to be helpful. They...

Problem solving is definitely its own skill, and like everything else, you have to practice to get good at it. It's pretty easy, for example, to understand Newton's laws of motion conceptually; it's quite different to apply them to solve problems. To add to @berkeman suggestion above, after you...

I don't know about defining velocity and acceleration, but Knight, for instance, uses what he calls motion diagrams to illustrate uniform and uniformly accelerated motion. Try taking a look at Hewitt's Conceptual Physics book. He uses a lot of drawings to try get ideas across.

Did you figure it out, @hmparticle9?

I too think focusing on the individual steps is misguided. What would be helpful to many students is learning how to read an equation and interpret individual terms physically, so they don't see it as just a bunch of symbols.

Yeah, nothing more annoying than the student who can't be bothered to even try. I do, however, generally find that most of my STEM students genuinely want to learn and understand the material. Some just don't know how to, though.