The Special Theory of Relativity
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Daily Schedule Term 3
See also Daily Schedule Term 2
Week 1 — Chapter 4, The Twin Paradox in Detail
- Tuesday — Taylor & Wheeler Chapter 4, Sections 4-1 to 4-7 — Homework 7: do Taylor & Wheeler Problem 4-1, just parts (a)-(f) Homework 7 Solution
- Friday — Finish Taylor & Wheeler Chapter 4. Start Chapter 5, and get as far as Section 5.2. When finishing 4-2, don’t get bogged down in the discussions of general relativity in Section 4.10, nor in the discussion of acceleration in Box 4-1 — Homework 8 and Homework 8 Solution.
Week 2 — Chapter 5, Spacetime Diagrams, Worldines
- Tuesday — Taylor & Wheeler Sections 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 — HW 9 Taylor & Wheeler problems 5.2(a), 1-6, and 5-3. This homework is heavy on graphing. Get tracing graph paper from me. Use my concentric circles template — Homework 9 Solution — use class time to lecture on Section 5.6
- Friday — Finish reading Chapter 5 (Sections 5.7 to 5.10) and for HW 10 do Problems 5-4, 5-5, and 5-6 — Homework 10 Solution
Week 3 — Chapter 6, Regions of Spacetime, Causality
- Tuesday — Read all of Chapter 6 for Tuesday — for historical perspective, adding key chapters from 3rd Edition of Einstein’s popularization, translated into English by Robert Lawson in 1920, formatted as an “Elegant Ebook” by José Menéndez — in class, do 6-1, 6-2(a), 6-2(b), and 6-2(c) — introduce Lorentz transformations for displacements — introduce concepts from section 7-1
- Friday — For HW 11 do Problems 6-2(d), 6-3, 6-4(b) — Homework 11 Solution — read and discuss sections 7-2 and 7-3
Week 4 — Chapter 7, Conservation of Energy and Momentum
- Tuesday — First half of class, Term 3 Exam, covering Chapters 4 to 6 — discuss Taylor & Wheeler Sections 7-4 and 7-5
- Friday — Finish Chapter 7 (Sections 7-6 and 7-7) and start Chapter 8 (Sections 8-1 and 8-2) — also discuss pp. 219-233 from Einstein’s Generation — in this historical reading covering just a few years prior to 1905, physicists are struggling to understand how much more energy and momentum the electromagnetic field of a moving electron contains compared to one at rest, assuming that the energy of an electron is due to its electromagnetic field — Einstein’s 1905 paper settles this problem in electromagnetism
Week 5 — Chapter 8, Relativistic Kinematics
- Tuesday — Continue your reading in Taylor & Wheeler through Section 8.6 — Chapter 8 has 41 end-of-chapter problems! — HW 12 is 7-7(a), 7-9, and 7-10(a) and (b) PLUS 8-2, 8-8, and 8-9 — Homework 12 Solution
- Friday — Finish Taylor & Wheeler Chapter 8 and Start Chapter 9 (sections 9.1 to 9.3)
Week 6 — Chapter 9, Curved Spacetime
Week 7 — Last Class of Term 3