The following content is provided under a Creative
Commons license.
Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to
offer high quality educational resources for free.
To make a donation or view additional materials from
hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at
ocw.mit.edu.
PROFESSOR: So 8.03 is the physics of
vibrations and waves.
It's the third course of physics.
It is not a general Institute requirement, except of course,
physics majors will have to take the course.
We cover the traditional material that you find in all
vibrations and waves--
coupled oscillators, resonance phenomenon, mechanical
oscillations, electromagnetic oscillations.
And over and above, I try wherever possible to make
students see, also, through 8.03, the familiar world
around them, at least the world that
they have heard about.
I spend one whole lecture on musical instruments, which is
a resonance phenomenon.
I tell them why sunsets are red, and why
the skies are blue--
which is an immediate consequence of Rayleigh
scattering, which is part of 8.03.
I talk to them about rainbows, about coronae, and about
glories around airplanes.
Particularly rainbows can be completely understood in all
detail, qualitatively and quantitatively, if you
understand 8.03--
if you understand the basics of 8.03.
We refer to that as Snell's law, but
also the Fresnel equations.
A combination of the two will tell you everything you want
to know about rainbows.
And I always tell the students that looking at rainbows is
very different than seeing rainbows.
And indeed, I ask them a dozen questions about rainbows, the
rainbows that they have seen so many times in their lives,
and most of the students cannot even answer one of
those questions.
And I make them see the beauty of the rainbow, but it's the
knowledge that is what I call the hidden beauty that makes
it exciting.
I also introduce neutron stars and black holes, and I talk
about Big Bang cosmology because we
cover Doppler shifts.
So my goal is, wherever possible, to go the extra mile
and make students see things that are often hidden in
courses like this.
We evaluate the students through traditional exams.
The lectures are given in the main lecture hall of MIT, and
then the students meet in smaller groups with
professors.
We call those recitations, which is
largely problem solving.
When I came on 8.03, on 8.03 I also had
some kind of a contest.
I showed them a picture that I took at DeCordova Museum in
Lincoln in June of 2004.
And it's a real picture.
It's really interesting to look it up on the web.
It's also on the OCW.
You see my shadow, and around my head are
some remarkable colors.
And the question was, what causes this?
And it's not so easy to come up with the right solution.
It was also the astronomy picture of the day on, I think
it was, September 13, 2004.
And I received 3,000 answers from all over the world, but
there were only 50 that had the basic idea correct.
And only 5 of them had the real
physics completely correct.
And almost no students at MIT got a substantial amount of
extra course credit, but since I promised course credit,
depending upon at what level they were able to explain it,
about a dozen got a little bit of course credit.
But I don't think there was one--
yeah, maybe one or two complete explanations.
And I can't tell you what it is now because then I would
give it away.
The students who look at the website of OCW of 8.03 will
see that picture, and I leave it up to them to send me email
and tell me what they think it is.
But if they're smart, they can find, somewhere, the solutions
because I think it was in December of 2004 that I gave
the solutions to the astronomy picture of the day.
And so they were made worldwide known, and so
everyone who made the wrong guess could
read the correct solution.
It's a strange picture.
It's a very interesting picture.
I don't think there's any difference between 8.01, 8.02,
and 8.03 in depth.
They're just different courses.
They cover different materials.
However, since in 8.01 most lecturers will cover resonance
phenomena, therefore it is natural to introduce musical
instruments which are the result of resonances.
Since in 8.03 resonance phenomenon are almost at the
heart of the course-- so they are enormously covered to
incredible depth, way more quantitatively than in 8.01--
the musical instruments come up, in a natural way, again.
In 8.01, you are likely to cover-- you don't have to, but
you're likely to cover--
the Doppler effect--
the famous effect that when a train approaches you, that the
whistle has a higher pitch than when the train
goes away from you.
Well, we also cover that in 8.03, but at more depth.
And we cover not only Doppler shift for sound, but also
Doppler shift for light.
And that's where Big Bang cosmology comes in in a very
natural way.
So there are some overlaps, and it is interesting to
select those overlap, particularly since those are
the ones that appeal to the students a lot.
When they learn about Big Bang cosmology, then they're
sitting on the edge of their seats.
And it's nice if you can do that both in 8.01, and you can
do that also in 8.03.
And the same is true for red sunsets and rainbows.
If you cover 8.02, electricity and magnetism, you come to the
point that you want to know what light is doing in glass
and in water.
Well then, the rainbows are a very natural topic to choose.
But when you later do 8.03, you go beyond that.
Not only do you teach the students what happens with the
light when it goes into a material--
it changes direction.
We call that refraction--
but you go one step further.
You also make them calculate the light intensity changes,
and that's what we call the Fresnel equations.
And that they will not see in 8.02, but they
will see it in 8.03.
But yet you could still, doing both lectures at different
levels, cover rainbows.
And that's what students would love to hear about because
they will see rainbows at least once or twice a month.
And once they have seen a lecture on rainbows by me, the
rainbows will never be the same for them.
They will always think of me whenever and wherever they are
in the world when they see a rainbow.
And that is what I mean when I say, I want to make them love
physics and want to make them see through the equations.