Elisha Huggins,Dartmouth College, Department of Physics and Astronomy Emeritus Faculty

Topic: "Introductory Contemporary Physics"  (Video)

ABSTRACT:  What laws of physics apply to everything, and have no known exceptions?  We can think of two--the principle of relativity and the uncertainty principle.  Our goal has been to construct an introductory physics course with emphasis on these two laws.  To do this, we begin with the principle of relativity, a law understood by Galileo, and end with the uncertainty principle after focusing on the particle-wave nature of matter.

In our talk we will start with the way we handle the time-energy form of the uncertainty principle, and then describe some of the steps we took to get there.  The most important step was introducing special relativity in week one.