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Now that you’ve gotten the boring physics courses out of the way, we can do the fun stuff!

Modern Physics will take you from the 19th century up to the 21st! It’s all the

ideas that have changed the world!

Welcome to Modern Physics!

References:Modern Physics for Scientists and Engineers (3rd ed.) by Thornton & Rex

Quantum Physics of atoms, molecules, solids, nuclei and particles, R. M. Eisberg and R. Resnick

(1974).

Modern Physics for Scientists and Engineers (3rd ed.) by Thornton & Rex.

Lecture notes of Rick Trebino.

Elementary Modern Physics, R. T. Weidner, R. Sells (1973)

Introduction to Special Relativity, R. Resnick (1972) Modern Physics, Bernstein, et al.

Modern Physics, Krane

Modern Physics for Scientists and Engineers, Taylor, et al

Modern Physics, Serway, et al (Brooks Cole)

Modern Physics, Ohanian (Prentice Hall)

My lectures are on the web

All my lectures in PDF will be

on my web site: http://sci.ui.ac.ir/~sjalali

Please download them before class, so you don’t have to

take many notes in class.

I’ll be creating and continually

modifying them as the term progresses, so it’s best not to

download them all the first day,

and instead to download each lecture a day or two before

class.

Homework

You would give me your homework per week at my office

not in class or under my door.

You can work with others on homework (I encourage you to do so!), but write it up yourself.

Evaluation Procedures:

1) Midterm (40% or 45%) + Final (50% or 45%) + Homework (10%)

2) Midterm (25% or 30%) + Final (40% or 35%) + Homework (10%) +

Research (25%)

N.B. Choice is yours to select procedure Number 1 or Procedure Number 2

If you wish to select procedure 2, I would suggest going through the following

textbooks:

Elementary Modern Physics, R. T. Weidner, R. Sells (1973)Introduction to Special Relativity, R. Resnick (1972)

The Importance of Having Class

In the past, people who have skipped a

lot of classes have

received very bad grades. Conversely,

people who’ve come

to most or all of the classes nearly always

receive A’s and B’s.

You should come to class because there’s a lot that I’ll say that

won’t be in the Power Point files. And which will be on the quizzes.

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Modern Physics has very some

unintuitive ideas.

In fact, this course will hit you with more than any other course

you’ll ever take. The goal is simply to expose you to them, and

later courses will cover them on more detail.

Understanding the ideas of each lecture requires the knowledge of the

previous lectures.

If you keep up,

you won’t end up looking like this

the night before

the exams!

Modern Physics

Special relativity

Quantum mechanics

Wave, particles, and weirdness

Atoms, molecules, and nuclei

Particle physics

General relativity and Cosmology

Revolutions in other fields

Modern Physics is 20th century physics.

19th century physicists

thought they had it all

together. They had Physics I and II down and thought that

that was about it. All that

remained was to dot the i’sand cross the t’s.

Man, were they in for a surprise. Several of them actually. Modern

physics is the story of these surprises (quantum mechanics and

special and general relativity), surprises—revolutions, actually—that have changed the world beyond all recognition.

The purpose of this course is to introduce you to all this fun new stuff.

Scanning-tunneling microscope image

of individual atoms