Yury Levin

Same as 2801: 20% PSETs, 30% midterm, 50% final. PSETs are, on average, easier than in 2801 (~3 hours/week), but sometimes the Matlab problems can be annoying. The midterm and final are perfectly doable, with the final especially curved to egregious levels (>= 42/50 yields 100%).

Introductory Mechanics from a rigorous and more theoretical standpoint. Standout topics include Rigid Body Motion, Orbital Motion and Special Relativity. Derivation of many basic mechanical equations from first principle laws. Introduction to Numerical Integration Methods.

I learned a lot about the structure, composition and evolution of single and binary stars, white dwarves and black holes

I learnt multiple mathematical skills which are very useful for Physics students.

A solid introduction to elementary topics in electromagnetism (including electrostatics and electrodynamics, but without material electromagnetism and the multipole expansion) and quantum mechanics. We use French's textbook for QM which is hit-or-miss (Griffiths' problems are way better; Nielsen & Chuang's conceptual musings are way clearer), but quantum mechanics is far simpler than classical mechanics so it doesn't matter anyway. The best part are again Yuri's lectures, which are easily comprehensible and often cover the material from alternative perspectives. Unfortunately, we did not have the time to cover arguably the crowning achievement of 20th century QM - the resolution of the hydrogen atom. And likewise, we did not study the Lorentz-covariant form of Maxwell's equation. Still, it's a good start towards a broad survey of undergraduate physics.

Mechanics and a ton of problem-solving/critical thinking

The knowledge about the different type of stars.

P-sets are very hard unless you've been involved with physics olympiad or something like that. For 2801 they were often >20 hours per week but for semester 2 usually between 10 and 15. They are only 20% of the grade, though, with the final being 50 and the midterm being 30.

Newton's Laws, Kinematics, Energy, Angular Momentum, Uniform Circular Motion, Fictitious Forces, Rigid Body Motion, simple harmonic motion, Lots of Celestial Body Movement (including calculating orbits, specific energy, eccentricity, apastrons and periastrons, LRL vector, Kepler's Laws, Kepler 2 Body Problem), Special Relativity in depth, numerical analysis methods using MatLab, and so much more. Basically a more rigorous look at AP Physics C: Mechanics before the midterm and then rigid body motion/simple harmonic motion/celestial movement/special relativity after midterm.

Use of scaling arguments to obtain a crude impression of orders of magnitude for physical quantities in the context of astrophysics (a field in which experiments are not as easy to conduct); the evolution of stars, hydrodynamics, recent research problems