Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

In my most recent general science requirement mechanics lecture, I started on the topic of forces.

I broached, of course, with Newton’s Three Laws of Motion, giving the equation form for the last two, then concentrating on the second one, about acceleration, which defined forces as being related to mass and acceleration.

I gave some examples for getting the summation of forces in one dimension, and how several forces acting on one object can only give it one acceleration in one direction.

I could only come up with so many examples of this before I had to proceed to forces in two dimensions. I warned them that we would go for the simpler situation first, which is as seen from the top view – in other words, gravity does not figure into the picture for now. I taught them about how to translate angles with compass directions (such as 30 degrees east of north) into a standard angle we would be using for all problems.

Then I asked them to recall their trigonometry (all except one that is, who was still taking it up simultaneously) on the relationship of two sides of a right triangle to the third using the sine and cosine functions. I then gave them several examples of summing up forces in two dimensions using this, although I skimmed over the part for getting the arctangent and how to tell which quadrant it is supposed to fall under. Some students asked me to clarify that at the end of the class, so I might give a more in-depth review of that.

Next meeting I will start with merging this with the concept of the object either being pushed or pulled having a velocity (initial and instantaneous) and displacement, and solving problems beginning with forces and ending with velocity (acceleration being the quantity in common) or going vice versa.

In my Electromagnetic Theory class, I ran through the chapter on electric fields since only the oil drop experiment and the use of the dot and cross product were the ones I didn’t discuss with them before. I would have wanted to go into plotting the electric field in two dimensions given the positions of the charges, but that’s really better suited for a graphing class than theory.

I also told the students about the problem set, which they were the ones to decide on, and give the deadline, surprisingly reasonable (one week from that meeting).

I’m saving the continuing anecdotes about a certain student for later.

Session 1513 has to comprehend the basics to get far in the advanced topics. Class dismissed.