| HPS 0410 | Einstein for Everyone | Spring 2017 |
Back to main course page
Test 1. Wednesday January 25. The test will be in the first 15 minutes of class and will consist of 3-4 questions requiring answers of a few sentences each. The material examinable is the content of the chapters "Special relativity: thePrinciples," "Special Relativity: Clocks and Rods," "Special relativity: Adding Velocities," "Relativity of Simultaneity," "Is SpecialRelativity Paradoxical?" and the assignments 1, 2 and 3.
Test 2. Wednesday February 8. The material examinable is the content of the chapters "E=mc2", "Origins of Special Relativity," "Einstein's Pathway to Special Relativity," the three "Spacetime" chapters and the assignments 4 and 5.
Test 3. Wednesday February 22. The material examinable is the content of the chapters: "Skeptical Morals," "Morals about Theory and Evidence," "Morals about Time," the chapters on Non-Euclidean Geometry, especially as summarized in "Spaces of Constant Curvature" and "Spaces of Variable Curvature"; and the assignments 6 and 7. The conventionality of simultaneity is excluded from the examinable "morals" sections.
Test 4. Wednesday March 15. The material examinable is the content of the chapters "General Relativity," "Gravity Near a Massive Body," "Einstein's Pathway to General Relativity," "Relativistic Cosmology" and "Time Travel Universes"; and the assignments 8 and 9.
Test 5. Wednesday March 29. The material examinable is the content of the chapters "Our Universe: What We See," "Big Bang Cosmology" and "Must There Have Been a Big Bang": and the assignments 10 and 11.
Test 6. Wednesday April 19. The material examinable is the content of the chapters "Black Holes," "A Better Picture of Black Holes,""Origins of Quantum Theory," "Quantum Theory of Waves and Particles," "The Measurement Problem" and the assignments 12, 13 and 14.
