Summary

I haven't checked my mail in over a week, so couldn't respond sooner. Sorry. Anyway, lets get down to business. After much ado, this structure has been finalised for our discussions.

Karthik will be dealing with Classical Mechanics, and following that, Electrodynamics.

Raunaq's is a course in Theoretical Physics. More on that by him.

Shruthi and I will be handling Quantum Mechanics(non-relativistic). between us, as it was decided that all of us will give one lecture per week.

The following is a summary of what has been happening for the past few weeks in our sessions:

September 2, 2010

Session 1: Raunaq

He started by getting us to question the basic notions of space, time and velocity, and it was left to us to prove that if the definitions of the above depend on each other, i.e. they are interrelated, then there must exist a constant velocity, and this velocity turns out to be the maximum velocity anything can have, i.e., the speed of light. We then tested new waters by being introduced to elementary set theory. A lot of mind-bending for us non-mathematicians!

Session 2: Karthik

Another session of questioning and unlearning. We spent the hour talking about our 'definitions' of force, momentum, acceleration and our understanding(or in my case, not!) of Newton's laws. This discussion took up the whole sessions as we analysed these so-called 'basics' and discovered new ways of looking at it.

September 5, 2010

Session 1: Harshini

It was initailly decided that Shruthi and I would handle electrodynamics, before we settled on QM. But we had one session, where we didn't get past Coulomb's law, due to our tendency to analyse every little thing without taking anything for granted. Its not a bad thing at all, for it helps in gaining a better understanding of the subject, and reveals flaws in our understanding. But due to time-constraints, we've decided to cut down on our long-winded discussions.

And oh, this discussion went on for so long, Shruthi didn't even get a chance to talk that day. Sorry S.

September 11, 2010

Session 1: Karthik

Now we dug our teeth into the concept of inertia and this lead to another round of discussion. We managed to proceed to the concept of phase diagrams and their usefulness and importance in Classical Mechanics. Then he introduced the concept of the Lagrangean which started off another round of discussions. Time-management was really becoming a problem now! Again, this was the only session we could have on this day.

September 12, 2010

Session 1: Shruthi

Hers was an introductory lecture to show the need for a new theory at a micro-level. She discussed the problem of black body radiation, the anomalous behaviour of liquid helium under certain conditions, the phenomenon of superconductivity etc. She sent us links to videos of experiments to demonstrate some of these phenomena. This session brought to light many interesting experimental phenomena.

Session 2: Raunaq

We dove right into set-theory, having dutifully completed the assignments we had been given. In this session, we dealt with what actually makes up vector spaces(one of our assignments, actually)and we were then led to an introduction to Lie algebra, followed by some problem-solving. And oh, abstract mathematics caused a lot of brouhaha again.