Splash Biography

We will be covering some introductory statistical mechanics, going beyond the high school thermodynamics covered in chemistry (and some physics) classes. We will be discussing entropy, partition function, maxwell-boltzmann distribution, fermions/bosons, free energy, and if we have time, the quantum partition function. We will use Thermal Physics by Schroeder as a reference.

We will be discussing how black holes affect the spacetime around them, starting from Einstein's equations. We will discuss metrics, geodesics, Minkowski diagrams, Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes, Penrose diagrams, and some interesting consequences (gravitational redshifting, time dilation, frame dragging). No knowledge of relativity is required.

What is an alternative to Newtonian mechanics, which seem to be the only formalism in classical mechanics we learn in school? This course will introduce you to the wonderful world of variational mechanics (which I find to be much more elegant than Newtonian physics), covering Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, Noether's theorem, and how to derive principles of Newtonian mechanics. If we have time I will go through some problems and applications.

How does moving at a constant speed change how you view the world? We will be covering time dilation, length contraction, and loss of simultaneity, and derive the Lorentz transformations and present it with 4-vectors. We will compare these with the Galilean transformation and see how it reduces to classical mechanics if you suppose an infinite speed of light. Time permitting, we will work through some common problems and its roots in electromagnetism.