Re: Essay Exam Questions

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

Tim O'Donnell asked for:
> the five most important essay questions
>  ... valued above all other physics knowledge.

Below is a general list.  More than five, alas.  It
will have to be narrowed down depending on what was
covered in class.

1) How to do an experiment.  Uncertainty:  how to think
about it, how to express it.  Data analysis.  Graphs.
Spreadsheets.

2) Time, position, velocity, and acceleration.  Vectors.
Newton's laws.  Structure of the rotation group.

3) Conservation.  Locality and causality.  Conservation
of energy.  Conservation of momentum.  Galileo's principle
of relativity.

4) Qualitative reasoning.  Symmetry arguments.  Conservation
arguments.  Scaling arguments.  Dimensional analysis.
How to make a _controlled_ approximation.

5) Entropy.  Local non-decrease of entropy.  Thermal
equilibrium.  Carnot.  Shannon.

6) Harmonic oscillators.  Simple.  Damped.  Q.

7) Waves. Traveling waves.  Standing waves.  Superposition.
Interference.  Diffraction.

8) Electricity & magnetism.  RLC circuits.

9) Gravitation.  Kepler's laws.  Equivalence principle.
Geodesics.

10) Special relativity.  Spacetime diagrams.  Structure of the
Lorentz group.

11) States of matter.  Phase transitions.  Fluid flow.
Stiffness, strength, elasticity.

*) Lots of stuff beyond the scope of the course:  quantum,
atomic, nuclear, biophysics, nonlinear dynamics, ......