PHYS UN1403

I learned some physics, but mostly I learned how to handle and navigate through the most disorganized and convoluted class I have ever taken.

Weekly problem sets, varying difficulty. He creates some impossible ones himself but others are from the book and relatively easy. He does tell you which problems will be graded. 2 midterms and a final. May or may not be open book, but it's not like the book even covers the material, so it doesn't really matter.

Weekly Problem Sets. 2 Midterms and a cumulative final.

Introductory ideas relevant to classical waves and quantum mechanics, independent problem solving, contextualizing physics in history.

Classical and Quantum waves, how quantum applies to engineering and everyday devices, nuclear physics, and lasers

Avoid this man like the plague. He has never taught undergrads before, and makes his lack of respect for students completely apparent. A very intimidating guy, Miklos claims he is approachable, but he has such disdain for students who don't understand, that there's no point. The material he teaches is very far beyond what anyone has seen in prior physics classes, not because it's actually that complex, but because he refuses to use math that anyone knows how to do. Remember everything you learned how to do with sin and cos to solve wave problems, forget it all...he teaches by the Euler method. Unfortunately, the textbook does not, nor do any other textbooks, so after he flies throught incomprehensible lectures and you don't get it, you're totally screwed. The physics help room is at a loss, and the TA for the class thinks you belong on the ground with your nose in the dirt if you don't understand what is happening. After numerous complaints by students to deans, the work and teaching style got a little better, but this is still a really hard class and Miklos doesn't really give a shit if he lectures to you and you learn it, or if he just gets to talk for awhile. The only saving grace is that everyone is generally lost, so the curves are terrifically low.

This is my first time to review a course/professor here but I'll try to be objective. Prof. Mawhinney is kind/nice and he is willing to answer your questions during/after each lecture. However, I have to say he did not seem to care about how well students followed his lecture. At the beginning of the semester, he mentioned the topics we were going to learn would be conceptual and might be difficult to follow. You know Einstein's Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are one of the most difficult subjects in Intro level of science courses. However, his class is more than that. His lectures are full of mathmetics, such as extremely complicated integrals, Fourier Transforms, and trigonometry, which is certainly useful if you are going to study advanced physics courses. But this is a 1400 level course and the title of this course is "INTRODUCTION to wave......", and I think that this course is NOT supposed to be that hard. You have the Halliday's textbook from last two semesters and this was also our official textbook. However, unfortunately, this professor did not teach along with the textbook. It is helpful if you read the book and solve the problems in the book. I actually felt the book was quite great in terms of describing somewhat complicated Einstein's theory and Quantum physics. I found myself being interested in those topics because the textbook was quite straightforwa…

Understanding quantum physics through both a quantitative and qualitative manner

I learned how to answer the questions that Chuck deemed the most important things for engineers to know (even though I'm not an engineer and I'm actually interested in physics). I.e. 2-3 questions on classical waves, ~5-6 questions on quantum waves, and a bunch of short memorized descriptions of explanations of how devices like LEDs, nuclear reactors, and solar cells work. I did NOT learn an introduction to classical and quantum waves / quantum physics.

simple harmonic motion, mechanical waves, electromagnetic waves, relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics