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Basic information
Location, contacts, office hours, textbook, course components and overview.

Syllabus
Detailed course outline, learning goals, grading scheme, policies.

Course content
All the course material organized in a table. Deadlines, reminders and links.

Physics 200: Relativity and Quanta

Basic Information

Instructors

Professor: Joanna Karczmarek

Office: Hennings 400
Office Phone: 604-822-2929
Email: joanna AT phas.ubc.ca
Homepage
PHYS 200 Office Hours: Wednesday 10-11am, Friday 10-11am.
I am happy to see students any time I am in the office, so drop by and introduce yourself.

Teaching Assistants:

Name	email handle
Emmanuel Fonseca	efonseca
Alexander Held	alheld
Stephen Pietromonaco	spietro
Fumika Suzuki	fumika
Anson Wong	awcwong
(all e-mails are AT phas.ubc.ca)

TA Office hours/Homework help sessions:
Mondays and Tuesdays 4:15-5:45pm, Hennings 301

Location

Lectures

Monday, Wednesday, Friday: 9am-10am in Hennings 200.

(Mandatory) Tutorial

Thursday 11am-12:30pm in Hennings 200.

Textbook

For the first half of the course, we will use 'Special Relativity' by T.M. Helliwell, a paperback that retails for about $60. For the second half of the course, there will be a course pack available from the bookstore. The course pack is the first 4 chapters of 'Quantum Physics' by John S. Townsend. If you are planning on taking more quantum mechanics courses, you might find it useful to own the entire book instead of buying the course pack from the bookstore. This is the same selection of books as was used last two years. Used books/course packs are encouraged, as is sharing.

Clickers

You will need an i>clicker for the lectures. i>clicker is a response system that will allow you to respond to questions that will be asked during class and tutorials. You will be graded on your in-class participation. If you don't already have a clicker, you can buy one at the UBC Bookstore. You will also need to register it; here are the instructions (The instructions are a bit dated. You will be able to find the i>clicker Remote Registration tool from the course's Home Page.)

Course components

The course will consist of:

Pre-lecture study assignments
There will be a weekly reading assignment. You might be asked to read appropriate sections of the book, listen to pencasts or read supplementary notes. The assignment will be posted in the Before column of lecture-by-lecture table called Course Content. Each pre-lecture reading assignment will be accompanied by a quiz. These short quizzes will be worth 3% of the final grade and will be due by Monday morning (9am, start of the Monday lecture). You will need to achieve an 80% score on the pre-lecture reading assignments to receive 100% credit for this part of the course. About 1 hour a week should be spent on the pre-lecture readings and quizzes. Note: The pre-lecture reading assignmets are not everything you need to read for the course, only those specific sections that you need to read before class.
Lectures with clicker questions
Lecture participation will be worth 3% of the final grade. Your responses will not be graded for correctness, only for participation. You will need a clicker (see above) to participate. You will need to respond to 80% of the questions asked in the course to obtain full marks for lecture participation.
Interactive Tutorials
The tutorials are an integral part of this course. You will work in small groups on a worksheet with simple questions designed to introduce new material and deepen your understanding. Tutorial attendance and participation will be worth 4% of the final grade. TAs will grade your tutorial sheet to access whether you have completed enough of it to get full marks, half marks or no marks.
Weekly Problem Sets
Problem Sets will be posted on Connect weekly (on Wednesdays). You will have a week to complete them and they will be graded. They will usually be made up of two components: shorter problems with multiple choice answers to be completed on Connect and longer, harder problems to be handed in on paper. The Problem Sets will be worth 20% of the final grade. Late Problem sets will not be accepted under any circumstances since solutions will be posted on-line shortly after the deadline.
Midterms
There will be two (in-tutorial) midterms, each worth 15% of the final grade. Check the Course content link (top right) for exact dates.
Final
The 2.5 hour final exam will be worth 40% of the final grade.

Course overview

In the first part of this course, well see that understanding physics involving relative velocities comparable to the speed of light requires a new framework, known as Special Relativity, that significantly alters some of our basic notions of time and distance, and has some startling consequences (e.g. that a person returning from a long voyage in space at a large velocity will find herself younger than her twin who stayed on Earth). Well see that many of the definitions of and relationships between basic physical quantities (e.g. velocities, momenta, energies) that you used in first-year physics are only approximations to more general formulae that hold true at large velocities. Despite their puzzling consequences, the new rules form a completely consistent framework that allows precise calculations for classical phenomena at arbitrary velocity (e.g. you will be able to calculate precisely how much younger the returning twin will be).

In the second part of this course, well discuss quantum mechanics, an even more drastic modification of the basic framework of physics that must be adopted to correctly explain physics at short distance scales, such as the physics of atoms and nuclei, and some physics at much larger scales. Well discuss experimental evidence that light has particle properties and that particles such as electrons can exhibit wavelike phenomena. Well see that the correct description of both light and electrons has features of both of these classical concepts, but is fundamentally different from anything in classical physics. Some of the questions that we asked in classical mechanics do not even make sense in quantum mechanics, so we will need to understand what questions we are allowed to ask before learning how to predict the answers. Well explore some basic consequences of the new framework and see how these can be used to explain various important phenomena in atomic and nuclear physics.

This course is also designed to build many 'soft skills'. You will learn to:

recognize when previous knowledge has to be re-evaluated as a result of new discoveries,
fit newly gained information into a growing framework of understanding,
connect conceptual understanding with quantitative (mathematical) expression (equations),
collaborate effectively with other participants in group work,
reflect on your learning and how it relates beyond this course: math courses, other physics courses, your understanding of how the universe works.

For more information, check the course Syllabus.