Reading:

  • Griffiths, Chapter 12.1 and 12.3 I’m hoping that 12.3 makes sense without 12.2, but you’ll have to let me know. You might end up having to skim through 12.2 for some things you need.

You may work together and get help from other students. Your solutions must be written in your own words, without looking at someone else’s solutions while you write them.

Instead of the usual 8 points we look for, please do the following: (1) Provide a sketch of the solutions to each problem. Whatever you got done in class is fine with me. (2) For #3 and #4 write a paragraph about how the journey of this class led to your ability to think about these problems. You can write about the mental/emotional/meta-physical journey if you want, but I would definitely like you to write about your journey through the concepts of the class (for example, we weren’t able to talk about EM waves until we had really understood statics, and then brought in dynamics.) __________________________

  1. Griffiths 12.6 NYTimes claims astronomers find things traveling faster than the speed of light…
  2. Griffiths 12.20 Practice with the invariant interval
  3. Griffiths 12.48 An electromagnetic wave observed from two different reference frames.
  4. Griffiths 12.58 Show that the Lienard-Wiechart potentials from chapter 10 can be expressed in relativistic notion very compactly.

Some problems for fun (not to turn in)

  1. Griffiths 12.3 Galileo vs Einstein, running down a train corridor…
  2. Griffiths 12.8 Rocket sending signals back to earth…