Physics
The physics major is one of the hardest majors at Knox. Through the study of physics, we attempt to understand the mechanisms which govern the properties of everything, including Chemistry (whose properties in turn govern Biology and so forth). In this way, physics is obscenely generalized and difficult to understand for some, exceeded in complexity only by pure mathematics and snowflakes.[1] Read the whole article, particularly "The Morphology Diagram."
Faculty
Knox has three physics professors, all experimentalists, principally. They are
- Charles Schulz - Dept Chair, Mossbauer Spectroscopy
- Thomas Moses - Liquid crystals
- Mark Shroyer - Nuclear quadrupole magnetic resonance
Courses
A typical major, after running through the three 100-level intro courses, will take
- 205 - Modern Physics
- 241 - Intro to Research
- 312 - Classical Dynamics
Then you have the option of several upper level courses such as
- 313 - Electricity and Magnetism
- 314 - Quantum Mechanics
- 316 - Astrophysics
- 308 - Optics
- 310 - Thermodynamics
- 242 - Digital Electronics
The Senior Seminars are the courses that kill you, especially when there's only 3 people in the class and one of them is Jordan Watkins, who is way smarter than you. Each year there are senior seminars offered in:
- Analytical Mechanics
- Quantum Mechanics
- Electrodynamics
Recently the Quantum Mechanics senior seminar was offered and only two students, Fahim Chandurwala and Tenzing Shaw were crazy enough to take it. The pair also took at the same time a half-credit independant study in Partial Differential Equations. The instructor for both courses is Tom Moses, arguably one of the most intelligent professors at Knox.
Notable Physics Quotations
- "You can always tell the particles apart, in principle - just paint one of them red and the other blue, or stamp identification numbers on them, or hire private detectives to follow them around. But in quantum mechanics the situation is fundamentally different: You can't paint an electron red, or pin a label on it, and a detective's observations will inevitably and unpredictably alter its state, raising doubts as to whether the two had perhaps switched places. The fact is, all electrons are utterly identical, in a way that no two classical objects can ever be. It's not just that we don't happen to know which electron is which; God doesn't know which is which, because there is no such thing as "this" electron, or "that" electron; all we can legitimately speak about is "an" electron." - David J. Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics 2nd Ed.
