courses > physics 221-223

physics 222

To use Spotter, click on one of the following links:

  • demo
  • homework (This link will not work until close to the beginning of the semester.)

The textbook is Fields and Circuits

Lab manual: download

codes for comments on lab writeups

I'm the author of the book. I do not receive any royalty from sales of the book. You can choose to download the book for free and print it yourself, but you typically don't save any significant amount of money that way, and what you get is a big, thick, unbound stack of single-sided output.

syllabus for Physics 222, spring 2021

practice exams and practice exam questions

See the syllabus for the actual list of topics for each real exam.

sample exam questions, without solutions

sample exams, with solutions (longer than the ones to be given spring 2021)

Practice exam A, Physics 221 and Fields and Circuits ch. 1-3

Practice exam B, Physics 221 and Fields and Circuits ch. 1-6

Practice exam C, Physics 221 and Fields and Circuits ch. 1-9

Practice exam D, Physics 221 and Fields and Circuits ch. 1-11

Practice exam E, Physics 221 and Fields and Circuits ch. 1-15

misc.

Web-based app to help with Fields and Circuits problem 9-19

video on mechanical resonance

physics 223

To use Spotter, click on one of the following links:

The textbook is Modern Physics

Lab manual: download

codes for comments on lab writeups

I'm the author of the book. I do not receive any royalty from sales of the book. You can choose to download the book for free and print it yourself, but you typically don't save any significant amount of money that way, and what you get is a big, thick, unbound stack of single-sided output.

syllabus for Physics 223, spring 2020

practice exams

The coverage of topics on these practice exams will not necessarily match up with what is actually covered on exam n in a given semester. See the syllabus for the actual list of topics for each exam.

Practice exam 1, ch. 5 and sec. 6.1

Practice exam 2, through sec. 12.4

Practice exam 3, through sec. 11.6

Practice exam 4, through sec. 13.2

Practice exam 5

miscellany

alternative labs

stuff related to the covid-19 epidemic

video on consonance and dissonance

video on optical ray diagrams

To calculate a standard deviation, click here.

Browser-based app demonstrating entropy

data analysis for exercise 12E in Optics

computer software for doing integrals

Usually the best quick and dirty way to do an integral is by using the web interface at integrals.com. However, integrals.com only does indefinite integrals, and there are cases where a definite integral is doable, but the corresponding indefinite integral is impossible to calculate, so you can't just evaluate the definite integral by plugging in the upper and lower limits of integration into the indefinite integral. As far as I know, the best open-source software for doing integrals is maxima. It runs on Linux, MacoS X, and Windows. If you want to try it out without installing it on your computer, you can use it through a web interface.

Examples of using Maxima to do integrals

the indefinite integral of cx^2:
  integrate(c*x^2,x);
     (The asterisk indicates notation. The second argument to the function tells the software what
     variable you want to integrate with respect to; it plays the same role as the Leibniz notation
     dx inside an integral in normal human calculus notation. Since c isn't the variable you're
     integrating with respect to, it's assumed to be a constant.)
the definite integral of e^-x, from 0 to infinity:
  integrate(exp(-x),x,0,inf);
     (Note that the Exp function has to be capitalized; the same is true for Sin, Cos, etc.
     INF stands for infinity.)
the definite integral of e^(-x^2), from 0 to infinity:
  integrate(exp(-x^2),x,0,inf);
     (Note that this integral can't be evaluated as an indefinite integral in terms of
     elementary functions like exponentials, trig functions, etc.)
To exit maxima when you're done:
  quit();