| Physics 419 Home Page | Course Notes | Homework | Announcements | Portrait Gallery |
where: 319 Sackett
when: Monday, Wednesday and Friday 11:15-12:05
| Instructor: | |
| Paul Lammert
(lammert@phys.psu.edu)
108 Osmond Lab phone: 863-3950 Office hours: Mon. 9:30-10:45, Tues. 7:00-8:00 pm, Fri. 12:15-1:30 | |
| Text: | Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, 4th ed., by Jerry Marion and Stephen Thornton |
The course syllabus is available in PostScript and PDF
Classical mechanics, or dynamics, is the science of motion
and it is fundamental to all of modern physics.
In this course we will study some famous and amusing problems.
We will recast Newton's mechanics in languages (Lagrangian
and Hamiltonian) which are not only practical for many problems
but allow the methods and ideas of mechanics to be extended
into every corner of physics. Though foundational, dynamics
is not petrified. The study of chaotic dynamics is a thriving
research field today. Unfortunately, there is only so much time,
and not everything which belongs to mechanics can be studied in
this course. It will be possible to look at chaos only briefly.
We will not study fluid and continuum mechanics, nor relativistic
mechanics at all.