final Report

Description

The report should be approximately 2-3 pages in length and should be double spaced. I’m not picky about font/formatting, I’m just trying to give you an idea of how much content there should be. I am not grading based on spelling or grammar either.

Prompt

The third section of this course has covered a much wider set of topics. We have seen:

Wave/particle duality

Photon emission/absorption

• Light sources + color/energy of light
• Reflection + mirrors
• Refraction + lenses
• Interference
• Polarization
• The quantum atomic model
• Nuclear radiation
• Relativity + special relativity
• Because these topics cover such a wide area, you are going to focus in on some of those above bullet points. Pick whichever topics that are interesting to you. Then you will investigate and find some way they affect you in your personal life. This assignment will have several parts:
• You will describe the object/scenario/experience in detail that you have picked.

What are you observing/experiencing? What object is it that uses the chosen topics? Which topics are relevant to the last month of physics?

I’m going to leave it up to you to research and find some examples of these topics and how they affect you. Some will be obvious (like using a mirror) and some will be less obvious and might need some research (for example, googling “how does special relativity affect me?” and clicking on the second link (livescience.com) gets you to some interesting ideas).

Make sure you explain how these physics concepts affect you, and describe your topics in terms of physics.

1. You will describe how your topic applies the above physics to your experience of the world. You can use this opportunity to beef up your report if it’s on the short side.

For example, if you mention special relativity, and then talk about GPS satellites, then you can look in to the other topics and see if GPS satellites use them as well. (Hint: they do! They use light to transmit information, and they concentrate light by using reflector dishes. Do they need to account for refraction in Earth’s atmosphere- I don’t know, but you’ll tell me!)