PHYS 436 Spring 2020

PHYS 436 :: Physics Illinois :: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Physics 436 Advanced Electromagnetism II

The Final Exam ...

Hour Exam II ...

... will take place on Friday, April 10 at 9 am. The exam will cover the material in Lectures 1-21, Griffiths Chs. 8 - 10.3.1 .

Because we are sequestered at home, this will be a take home exam. It will work in the following way: At 9 am on April 10 you will receive an email with a link to a Google Form and a pdf attachment containing the questions. You will have 24 hours to complete the exam, meaning your answers must be uploaded to the Google Form by 9 am on Saturday, April 11. Any legible format will be accepted, such as a scan or photos of the pages taken with a cell phone camera. At 9 am on Saturday, the form will be disabled and you will no longer be able to upload your answers.

Like past exams, this one will be open book, meaning you can use any static print materials from the course including the text, lecture notes, homeworks, discussion problems, etc. Communication with others in the class, or anyone else, about the exam questions is strictly forbidden. Please read the U of I's Guidelines on Academic Integrity for more information.

Physics 436 during the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic

Well, we are entering a brave new world of figuring out how to learn E&M while quarantining ourselves during a pandemic. This will be a work in progress, but below is what we will try. For this to work you will need a laptop with a camera and microphone and access to an internet connection. If you don't have this, please email me to discuss what to do: abbamont@illnois.edu. Please also send feedback to both me and the TAs regularly on how things are going and if there is anything we can do to make it work better. 

Lectures

Lectures will now take place onlne over Zoom. I will do this on the chalk board in my office using a camera and microphone (I will be alone, so this complies with Governor Pritzker's shelter-in-place directive). Lectures will take place at the usual time. Please login at least 15 min before class and register. This way I can give credit to people who opted in for the attendance program.

If you want to ask a question during lecture, just type it into the chat window. I will look at it frequently and answer questions as they come in.

Use this link to access the 436 lecture.

Office Hours

Office hours will also take place over Zoom at the same times as before. Please use the following links:

Homework

Homeworks 7-12 will be assigned in the same way they always have, i.e., by being posted on the course syllabus every week. Here is the link to the course syllabus. However, instead of dropping a hard copy in the 436 drop box, please scan the pages, or take photos with a cell phone camera, and upload them using the Google Form for that assignment. Links to the forms are also on the course syllabus. Here's the HW#7 upload form so you can see what it looks like. The graders will grade the assignments in the usual way.

Discussion

Billy will attempt to do Discussion using the breakout session feature in Zoom. I will post the discussion problems ahead of time each week on the course syllabus. He will split people up into Zoom groups of 3-4 people. Show Billy your work over the camera when it is done to get credit for the discussion.

Use this link to access the 436 Discussion.

Exams

Hour Exam II and the Final Exam will become take-home exams. You will have 24 hours to complete the exam and hand it in using a Google Form that I will create later. Please follow the UI's academic integrity guidelines for take home exams.

In Summary ...

These are tough times. I never imagined, at the beginning of the semester, that I would be sitting here in March creating an online course so we can survive a pandemic. It nullifies many of the reasons we go to college, which is supposed to be about getting out from behind our computers and engaging with other people and the world. Now we are stuck at home behind our computers anyway. This sucks but it won't last forever. Remember: E&M matters; nothing in our modern world works without it. If we try to stay positive and work together, we can make the most of this situation and still learn something.

Hour Exam I ...

...will take place in class on Friday, Feb. 28. The exam will cover the material in Lectures 1-10, Chs. 8 - 9.3.2 of Griffiths. The exam will be open book meaning you can bring any static print materials including the text, printouts of lecture notes, homeworks, or a pre-prepared equation sheet of your own making. Electronic devices of any sort are not permitted. Calculators are neither needed nor allowed.

Please respond to the iClicker attendance poll to choose whether you will participate in the Phys 436 attendance program:

https://forms.gle/t2hw639GiyNJRBQDA

You must respond by midnight on January 30, 2020. After that the poll will close and your response will be final.

Welcome to Physics 436! Class starts on Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020 in 144 Loomis.

Phys 436 is the second semester of a year-long course in Classical Electrodynamics. The focus of 435 was to define the basic structure of E&M culminating in Maxwell's equations. In Phys 436 we will actually use E&M to determine conservations laws for energy and momentum, and to understand propagation of electromagnetic waves, light scattering from interfaces, dispersion of optical constants (epsilon and mu), and wave guides and transmission lines, among other topics. We will also discuss in detail how Maxwell's equations require and are consistent with special relativity.

Again, the text will be Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics. The text is required. Either the 3rd or 4th edition should work.

We will use iClickers in this course for the optional attendance program. Please register yours using the links on the student gradebook.

Contact Information

Please use the email addresses listed below if you have any questions about any of the course components.

Academic Integrity

All activities in this course, including documentation submitted for petition for an excused absence, are subject to the Academic Integrity rules as described in Article 1, Part 4, Academic Integrity, of the Student Code.