Re: Creative back-of-the-chapter physics problems

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@SFU.CA>]

At 12:30 AM -0700 7/7/00, Tucker Hiatt wrote:
> I found Leigh's recommended Pippard book as "Cavendish Problems in
> Classical Physics" selling for $4.00 at http://www.powells.com.  (Note:
> Cavendish, not Cambridge.)  By the way, I located this book and the one
> described below by using a very sweet price comparison shopping engine at
> http://www.bestbookbuys.com.

My thanks to Tucker for correcting my error. My copy was given to me,
but the price printed on the cover is "5s. 6d. net; $1.00". It is
easily worth the $4.00. The problems are compiled by the Staff of the
Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge and *edited by* Brian Pippard. My
memory is getting shaky. Thanks also for that URL!

Here's one of my favorites from the book (modified for ASCII):

 185*. The high temperatuyre behaviour of iron may be idealized as
 follows: below 900 C and above 1400 C alpha-iron is the stable
 modification, and between these temperatures gamma-iron is stable.
 The specific heat of each phase may be taken as constant, being
 0.775 J/g-deg for alpha-iron and 0.690 J/g-deg for gamma-iron.
 What is the latent heat at each transition?

This is the prettiest problem I know for building the ideas that
entropy and internal energy are functions of state, and that they
are, as Clausius knew, very similar quantities.