Home Page for Physics 3310

Physics 3310, Electromagnetism

Instructor: Steven Pollock

Faraday cage

Left: a Farady cage large enough to test the electromagnetic properties of a bus. (Does a cell phone work if it's inside the bus?) This screened room is made by Frankonia. They also make entire rooms for special situations. Check out their copper room.
Right - Peter Terren (Dr. Electric) demos a Faraday cage with high efficiency earmuffs, UV filtered glasses, and a brimmed hat to help keep his head from the cage!)

Week 4 (Feb 4-Feb 8):

We are in Ch 2. This week, we discuss the interpretation of electric potential and the energy stored in static electric configurations of charge (both with and without conductors around) The fact that the curl of a static electric field is always zero tells us that a static electric field always can be written as the gradient of a potential function. (And, finding the potential is often easier than finding the E-field directly from Coulomb or from Gauss)

Special notes:

Preflight #4 is due Friday, Feb 8 (Password 3310)
ERRATUM: In class on Wed, my "To Read" assignment on the board was old. For Friday, please read Griffith 2.5.1-2. (See the calendar link, it's always got the reading assignment for each lecture, and I try to keep at least one lecture ahead)
~~This homework is HW 4 (due start of class Wed Feb 6) . ERRATUM: Small typo: on 1b, I said "for x>R", and of course I meant "for y>R". Sorry.~~
Next homework is HW 5 (due start of class Wed Feb 13) .
Video lectures: I found a really interesting set of Youtube videos here. I don't know the author (Jonathan Gardner) (he says he is not a professor) but I watched a few and found them really well done. If you want to see a "walkthrough" of various Griffiths example problems and text sections, this seems like it could be really helpful! It's in the format of very short "mini-lectures", and he organizes them (titles them) by sections in Griffiths. Let me know what you think. I cannot vouch for their accuracy, but what I've seen so far seemed ok.
Because D2L is flailing, I set up a Piazza account for our class for online fora and posting solutions. You should all have received an invite email - please go ahead and register. I've never used it before, so this is an experiment. If it doesn't work, we'll find something better. Feedback is welcome.
Society of Physics students has pizza and socializing on the 11th floor of the tower Wed at 5 PM all this term. Check it out!
Office hours are normally Monday and Tuesday, 4-6 (ish), in our classroom space
Reading: see the calendar, reading and assignments link (always available on the upper left) for reading assignments. We're covering 2.3 this week.
We have a D2L (learn.colorado.edu) site - I post homework solutions there. There's also a discussion forum, so you can help each other online on homeworks and preflights.

OLDER Webpages, for reference and old links: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3,

I welcome your comments on the class and this website. Send them to steven.pollock at colorado.edu
(Thanks to Prof. Chuck Rogers for many of our home page image ideas!)