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MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS


8.01 Fall 1998

8.01 COURSE INFORMATION SHEET

Course Administrator Address Office Phone E-mail
George Koster 4-334 3-4870 phyjbm@mitvmc.mit.edu
       
Lecturer      
Alan Guth 6-209 3-6265 guth@ctp.mit.edu
       
Course Manager      
Claudia LaBollita-James 4-352 3-4461 cljames@mit.edu

8.01 Study Guide:

Wit Busza, Susan Cartwright, and Alan H. Guth: Essentials of Introductory Classical Mechanics, 3rd Edition; available from the The Coop for $20.95. This is a required purchase. The Study Guide was written especially for this course, and will be your main resource for the course's material. It defines the content of the course and provides a concise discussion of the relevant principles of physics. If by the end of the term you understand and know how to use the material in the Study Guide, you will deserve an A for the course.

Text Book:

Hugh Young and Roger Freedman: University Physics, 9th edition, 2nd printing, Vol. I. This is also a required purchase, available at The Coop for $53.50. The 8.02 course to be taught next spring (1999) is expected to use a different textbook, so the purchase of Vol. II or the combined edition will not free you from purchasing another textbook next term.

When the material in the Study Guide is too concise for your taste, you can turn to the textbook, which provides the detailed derivations and explanations of all the results and formulas. It also has more worked examples and problems, problem-solving hints, etc. You should certainly buy this book as it contains material essential to the course.

The Coop is also selling two related books which you may wish to buy: 1) a study guide designed to accompany the Young & Freedman text, written by James R. Gaines and William F. Palmer ($25.00); 2) A Student's Solution Manual, by A. Lewis Ford ($21.00). These books are not required, and will not be used in any assignments related to the course. The assigned homework for this course will come from the 8.01 Study Guide, so you should be aware that the Student's Solution Manual will not DIRECTLY help you with your homework. Nonetheless, if you would like to have additional references, you may decide to buy one or both of these books.

Lectures:

Lectures will be given by Prof. Alan Guth on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 10:05 a.m. and again at 11:05 a.m., in Room 26-100. The lectures will explain the concepts that you are expected to understand, and will also include demonstrations aimed at solidifying your grasp of the material.

Recitation Classes:

You will be assigned to a class instructor and a class that meets two hours each week. These classes will provide an opportunity to ask questions about the material, and to practice the art of problem-solving. If you need to change your recitation class, ask at the Physics Education Office, Room 4-352.

Problem Sets:

Problem sets will be assigned about once a week; they will be handed out in lecture and will be available on the website. They will be discussed in the recitation classes and in the TV help sessions described below. Most of the problems will come from the Study Guide. The problem sets will not be collected or graded, but we are sure that you will find them essential in preparing for the quizzes and the final examination. Trying to learn physics without doing problems is like trying to learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book. The Course Calendar at the end of this handout shows the ``completion date'' for each problem set — i.e., the date by which we recommend that you finish the set. Solutions to each problem set will be made available on its completion date. Be sure to work (or at least try) the problems BEFORE looking at the solutions; it is very easy to read the solutions and fool yourself into thinking that you understand them. We strongly encourage students to get together in groups to discuss the homework.

Weekly Tutorials:

You will be assigned to a graduate student tutor, who will meet with you and probably two other students for a half hour each week. The tutorials will take place on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Sign-up sheets for the tutorials are to be posted in Room 4-339, the Physics Common Room, on September 9 (the first day of classes). You should sign up for a tutorial session before 5 p.m. on Friday, September 11. Be sure to PRINT your name clearly, with your last name (i.e., family name) first; example: ``Guth, Alan''. If your schedule changes during the sign-up period, you can change your choice by NEATLY crossing your name out and rewriting it in another blank. After the sign-up period, change requests will be processed by the Physics Education Office, Room 4-352.

Tutorial sessions will start on Tuesday, September 15. Attendance at these meetings is required, and will count for 5% of your grade in the course. Any student who exceeds a specified threshold on any of the Review Quizzes will be given an exemption from the attendance requirement until the next Review Quiz, and all students are given an automatic exemption for one week of their choice. Even if you have an exemption, we nonetheless recommend that you come.

TV Help Sessions:

Prof. Walter Lewin will discuss the problem sets on MIT's cable TV (channel 10), showing you how to solve all or most of the assigned homework problems. The tapes will be broadcast on the cable system 24 hours a day, and will also be available in the Physics Reading Room and the ``Reserve Room'' of the main library. You will find all the necessary details about how to access these help sessions at the end of each assignment.

Examinations:

WWW Website:

At http://web.mit.edu/8.01/www, the website includes quizzes and solutions from the past four years. It will also be used to post all announcements, homework assignments, homework solutions, and quiz solutions as the coming term progresses. (Announcements and assignments will also be handed out in lecture.) You are invited to use the anonymous feedback page to relay comments, complaints, or suggestions about the website or about any aspect of the course. Messages that you write on the feedback page are forwarded anonymously to the lecturer, Alan Guth.

Grading:

The Review Quizzes will count 35% of the grade, with the individual Review Quizzes counting 9%, 13%, and 13%, respectively. The Recitation Quizzes will count 20%, with the lowest of the 5 quizzes being dropped. Tutoring attendance will count 5%, and the Final Examination will count 40%. Since there is no way to guarantee that all recitation instructors will write quizzes that are equally difficult or grade them by the same standards, we will compensate for these differences as well as we can by ``renormalizing'' the Recitation Quiz grades. Each instructor will be calibrated by comparing the Recitation Quiz grades of his/her students with their Review Quiz and Final Examination grades (which are team-graded), and the Recitation Quiz grades will be corrected accordingly. The correction formula will guarantee that the average of the Recitation Quiz grades for all 8.01 students will not be changed.

There will be no make-up quizzes, so in the case of excused absences, the remaining grades will be averaged. A grade of zero will be assigned for any missed quiz that is not excused. Excuses for the Review Quizzes must be requested in advance of the quiz (if you are physically able to do so) from the Course Administrator, Prof. George Koster (Room 4-334, 3-4870, phyjbm@mitvmc.mit.edu). Acceptable excuses include verifiable and significant medical problems, religious holidays, and also serious personal situations, such as deaths in the family. For conflicts between Review Quizzes and athletic events, Prof. Koster will try to make alternative arrangements for the student to take the examination. For conflicts between a Recitation Quiz and an athletic event, an excused absence is appropriate. To request an excused absence for a Recitation Quiz, see your recitation instructor.

Comments by the Lecturer:

This year we are returning to the 3-lecture-per-week format for 8.01, after four years of experimenting with a 1-lecture-per-week format in which most of the material was presented in small sections which met three times each week. We are, however, continuing to use the Study Guide that was originally developed for the experimental format.

Wit Busza, Susan Cartwright, and I worked hard over the summer to make further improvements to the Study Guide, which we hope you will find a concise and convenient summary of the material, as well as an instructive collection of problems and solutions. We are asking you to also buy the textbook, however, because we expect that you will sometimes find the explanations in the Study Guide to be too concise.

Since the Study Guide is still under development, there will inevitably be some errors in it. As I discover these errors, I will post them on the website. If you discover any errors, I would very much appreciate your sending me an email message about them. No error is too small to be worth correcting.

8.01 is the mid-level first-year physics course, aimed at the majority of MIT students. It is paced faster than 8.01L, it is less rigorous than 8.012, and it does not have the emphasis on take-home experiments that characterizes 8.01X. Our goal is to convey the excitement of the physicist's quest to understand nature at its deepest level, and at the same time to provide the knowledge and tools that you will need to continue your studies in science or engineering. I hope you will enjoy the course.

— Alan Guth

Click here for 1998 course calendar: GRAPHICAL — TABLE — ASCII text — PDF — Postscript

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