PHYS 123 - General Engineering Physics III

• Recognize and articulate systematic behaviors in nature revealed by students’ own observations, especially those that are often overlooked through being obvious.
• Construct knowledge that does not depend on any outside authority; knowledge based on personal observation, reasoning, and possibly on physical laws or principles previously validated by the student. Students can explicitly articulate where they have done so and can devise instances where they can do this in other settings beyond the course.
• Demonstrate that they perceive that nature is governed by a small set of physical laws and principles, and exemplify this understanding by explicitly employing natural laws as components of a structured approach to design or problem solving.
• Employ a common approach to design and problem-solving in example cases that are fundamentally related but have diverse surface features.
• Represent a situation in general analytical, design and problem-solving settings, verbally, graphically, and mathematically, employing a structured approach to problem solving that leads from inputs to answers explicitly utilizing or respecting applicable physical laws.
• Exhibit a spectrum of problem-solving skills, including linear causal analysis, and global bookkeeping-type analysis (e.g. application of conservation laws). Students will productively employ methods to begin constructing solutions before the complete reasoning path is evident. They will also develop skills needed to validate results or claims by reasoning backward to check for consistency with fundamental principles.

Communications Outcomes

• Communicate science in authentic forms, including accurate reporting of apparatus and procedures, and construct arguments that reason physically from observations to conclusions using physical law and mathematics appropriately. The level of rigor expected is appropriate to the level of the course (that is, it increases through the sequence).
• Evaluate the quality of their observations and physical reasoning through understanding of origins and analysis of measurement uncertainty, limitations of theory and apparatus, and correct application of physical laws and principles.
• Read physics content written at the college level, including texts, journal articles, and physics problems.
• Interpret and generate clear physical reasoning (e.g. physics problem solutions) using multiple representations, including algebraic (symbolic), numerical, graphical, oral, written, and pictorial representations.

Specific Course Outcomes

• Extend the “Thinking like a physicist” outcome to particular discrete oscillating systems, oscillations of continuous media (and fields), and thermodynamic systems. Obtain the function or relationship characterizing a system’s behavior from which other measurable quantities can be calculated. Employ Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s equations, energy considerations, and assumptions about continuous media as needed in this process, and will recognize the role of differential equations in the general case.
  • Outline the path described above for damped and forced oscillating systems, and for mechanical and electromagnetic waves.
  • Distinguish the properties of waves arising from the medium from those imposed by the boundaries (including sources). Exhibit this understanding by explicitly employing these distinctions to identify productive approaches to problems or when predicting the outcomes of experiments with waves.
  • Describe Wave Optics and Geometric Optics as two physical models of the same behaviors and identify the conditions that govern their respective applicability. Employ each model in appropriate settings to predict optical phenomena and behaviors and to solve typical end-of-chapter problems.
  • Relate the energy inputs into a thermodynamic system to the changes in macroscopic and microscopic behaviors. Describe how the concepts of energy and entropy predict which processes can and cannot occur in nature.
• Connect fundamental laws and physical principles to ordinary experiences and to illustrations of experiences that will soon be encountered in professional careers (e.g., physics, chemistry, engineering, earth and space sciences, computer science, as well as related industries).
• Describe what physicists find unifying and elegant in the simplicity of having a few laws of great power and be able to describe or illustrate this in several distinct topical areas.

• Quantitative/Symbolic Reasoning

• Natural Systems (Science and the Natural World)

Find out when this course is offered