Some of you have requested more exercises in vector analysis after the lectures. Jørgen has gathered the best he could find in Griffiths’ book and asked us to upload them here:
These should give you some more experience with that part of the syllabus and help you get the vector analysis under control.
If you have missed out on some of the lectures or feel you could need a second view on some subjects, we recommend having a look at Walter Lewin’s lectures from MIT:
Our syllabus is not the same as in their course, but some lectures are very relevant. For instance there are lectures on Gauss law, electric flux, magnetism and much more that will follow in our course too.
Spending some time watching a few lectures when you have spare time or are tired of reading can help you grasp concepts that you find hard to understand. It could also be very inspiring!
Should you find some lectures especially useful, don’t forget to tip your fellow students about it by leaving a comment below.
There is a small change in the schedule effective from Tuesday, September 11, 2012:
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Fysisk fagutvalg is organizing a cabin trip for FYS1120 students at the KSI-cabin in Nordmarka. The trip is a supplement to the official teaching, and consists of lectures and problem solving with plenty of time to socialize. Important information follows:
For those who not have a card for bus, tram, metro in Oslo; you must remember money for public transport.
For questions about the trip contact FFU: fagutvalg@fys.uio.no
Saturday:
Sunday:
We have made a small demo that will allow you to play around with electric field lines in your web browser. You can place and move around charged particles to see how the field changes as you make your own charge configuration.
An electric field line simulator straight in your browser!
Note that there are some limitations to this simulation, leaving it a bit unphysical when it comes to lines that might end up in open space, wrong field line density and other quirks. All in all it should be correct to a decent approximation, though.
For the programming enthusiasts out there, the simulation is created using Javascript and HTML5. You can check out the source code here.
Enjoy!
It seems the IPython and Pylab packages has also been updated in 12.04 and thus removing the old ipython -wthread flag that would ensure Mayavi plots to be run in a separate thread. Running with the flag causes this error to show up:
[TerminalIPythonApp] Unrecognized flag: '-wthread'
Without this flag, the Mayavi plots lock up the UI and hangs. If you want to get the possibility back to rotate and play around with the plots, just start IPython the following way from now on:
ipython --pylab=qt
This will launch IPython with the Qt backend and threading. Using only –pylab does not include threading. For easy and quick access, add the following to a file named .bashrc in your home folder:
alias pylab='ipython --pylab=qt'
From now on you can launch IPython just by typing
pylab
in a terminal.
In the newest version of Enthought’s Python Distribution (EPD) on Ubuntu, the plotting package has been moved from enthought.mayavi.mlab to the shorter and more general mayavi.mlab. This does however mean that if you, like me, need to work with different versions of EPD on multiple systems, will experience the following error from time to time:
ImportError: No module named enthought.mayavi.mlab
Now, to avoid switching the import statement every time you switch systems, you can make Python check if one of the versions is installed during import. If it is not, we’ll tell it to try the other. This is done in this simple command:
try:
from enthought.mayavi.mlab import *
except ImportError:
from mayavi.mlab import *
Just replace any other similar import statements the same way and your code should once again be working across all your installations.
Ok, so we’re working on the home exam in classical mechanics and I decided to spend some time simulating the solution of the first exercise. Probably not the wisest way to spend time during an home exam, but what the heck. I’m learning some Javascript and HTML5, plus the fact that it’s always fun to verify results by looking at something moving!
So here you go. A pendulum on a cart.
I won’t go into details about deriving and solving the Lagrange equation for this system now, but I might get back to that at a later time. And of course there will be some added controls to this so you could set the initial positions, velocities and stuff. Sometime later, I hope.
Atle has written very helpful note on RLC circuits that could be pretty useful as a repetition before the exam. The book is not soo thorough on how to work with RLC circuits and does some parts of the text on specialized cases that are not necessarily working out in general. Reading about how to solve such circuits in the final pages of this note can turn out extremely valuable on the exam.
Enjoy!
If you’ve missed out on some lectures this semester or need some repetition for central subjects, we recommend having a look at Walter Lewin’s lectures from MIT:
Walter Lewin’s lectures on Electricity and Magnetism (MIT)
They do not coincide to our syllabus in all areas, but some lectures are very relevant. For instance there are lectures on magnetism, Lorentz’ force, LRC circuits and much more. I guess you could tell which ones you need or want to watch from the titles.
Spending some time watching a few lectures when you have spare time or are tired of reading can help you grasp concepts that you find hard to understand, and could be very inspiring!
Should you find some lectures very useful, don’t forget to tip your fellow students about it by leaving a comment below this post.
Enjoy!