103 Course Overview and Course Outcomes

These are student focused descriptions used in the Syllabus and Introductions Module on the Canvas Course Hub.

Course Overview: Learning to think like a Physicist

Physics teaches you that the world is governed by certain fundamental rules and principles, and by using those principles we can make all sorts of predictions about how the world works. It also teaches that many extremely complicated phenomena in our world can be understood through a relatively small number of physical principles, and that once you have acquired and understood these principles they are applicable to a near-infinite set of different situations. These two processes, breaking systems down based on their underlying principles and then using those principles to understand and predict how the systems behave, are key to both “critical thinking” and “thinking like a physicist,” which will serve you in many other areas of study and life.  Albert Einstein famously said “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.” In this courseyou will learn to understand and use certain equations and principles related to kinematics and dynamics, waves, fluids, and thermodynamics. However, the primary skill you will learn is to approach the world in a more systematic and analytical way.

Since many students take this course to meet the natural science breadth requirements for the College of Letters and Science, this course has been specifically designed to help meet several of the College of Letters and Science Undergraduate Learning Goals, including:

1. Develop a level of proficiency in the different “ways of knowing” the world through the arts and humanities, and the biological, physical and social sciences, which will be reflected in an ability to communicate across the disciplinary boundaries, so as to interpret and investigate the complex world in which they live;

2. Integrate knowledge across disciplines in order to bring novel perspectives to challenging social and technological problems;
3. Understand your own learning processes and possess the capacity to intentionally a) seek and evaluate information, b) recognize and reduce bias in their thinking, and c) build new knowledge for application in your personal and professional lives.

Course Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course learners will be able to:

1. Precisely describe an object’s motion using the fundamental quantities of position, velocity, and acceleration, and use the kinematic equations to predict how this motion will change over time
2. Determine when objects are in equilibrium by mathematically and diagrammatically adding up the forces on those objects, and predict their subsequent motion if they are not in equilibrium
3. Use conserved quantities like momentum and energy to infer how multi-object systems change over time
4. Describe periodic (repeating) phenomena using the fundamental quantities of amplitude, frequency, period, and wavelength, and use them to predict how the phenomenon will behave at later times or locations
5. Apply Newton’s laws and conservation principles to continuous, fluid-flow systems to describe their equilibrium conditions in terms of pressure, velocity, and flow rate in both idealized (non-viscous) and viscous fluids
6. Use the ideal gas law and principles of heat transfer to determine physical properties of gasses, and predict the work, heat, and energy changes in both thermodynamic processes and heat engines