Physics 1A Summer 2001: Newtonian Mechanics

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

Physics 1A Summer 2001: Lectures and WWW links

Healthy Diversions in Physics:

Bored with lecture notes? Want to deepen your understanding of the concepts without ploughing through problem calculations? Try these sites (more added weekly):

Amusement Park Physics, including design-your-own roller-coaster online. Learn "the forces behind the fun".

Physics 1A Lectures

Lecture notes will be posted in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format, usually on Wednesday evening. They are posted as a convenience only, not as a substitute for your own notes! Unfortunately, some of the files may be large (~1 Mbyte) and may take several minutes to download over slow connections.

Week 1: Week 1 lecture notes. Each file is one transparency (e.g. "lecture3b.pdf" is the second page of lecture 3). We shall use a more convenient format in later weeks.

Vector Addition Applet. (See also the demonstration on the Hecht CD-ROM).

Week 2: Acceleration, Newton's Laws, Dynamics and Statics.

Lecture 4 - Reading Quiz 1, Acceleration in 1 and 2 dimensions, inertial frames.
Lecture 5 - Motion under gravity: free-fall.(See also the interactive demonstration on the Hecht CD)
Newton's Cannon Java animation, with link to Newton's original diagram and explanation.
NASA's KC-135 "Vomit Comet" - flies in a parabolic trajectory to provide 25s of a weightless environment for astronaut training. A CNN article with images and movies.
Superman - the Escape ride at Magic Mountain provides thrill-seekers with 6.5s of free-fall. So how high is the tower? How fast are you moving at the bottom? (The required height of the tower, and the braking mechanism to slow the coaster will both add to the cost of building such a ride).
Remember: v_y= dy/dt = 0.0 - gt so y=y₀ - 1/2gt².
The world's tallest free-fall tower is in Hokkaido, Japan, and provides 10.0s of free-fall time. (Therefore, it must be (10.0s/6.5s)² times the height of the Superman ride, and the speed at the bottom must be (10.0s/6.5s) times greater). It is used for zero-gravity experiments, cheaper than sending them into orbit.
Lecture 6 - Projectile summary, momentum, Newton's 1st and 2nd laws.
Lecture 7 - Newton's 3rd law. Forces: gravity, weight, "effective weight", tension.
Why can't this man lift himself up?

Week 3: Work, energy, power, momentum and collisions:

Lecture 8 - Friction, Work.
Lecture 9 - Work, Kinetic and Potential Energy, Power.
Lecture 10 - Impulse, momentum conservation, elastic collisions.
Lecture 11 - Inelastic collisions.

Week 4: Circular motion, simple harmonic motion:

Lecture 12 - circular motion
Lecture 13 - motion in a vertical circle, Hooke's law of elasticity.
Lecture 14 - Simple Harmonic motion: masses and springs
Lecture 15 - SHM: energy, pendulum, damped and forced vibrations.

Week 5: Waves and Sound:

Lecture 16 part A part B - Waves and Sound.

Physics 1A

Philip Blanco email: pblanco@ucsd.edu