PH447 - Optics, Observations, and Data Analysis - Fall 2020 - 4 credits

Contact Information

• Instructor: Prof. Evan Tilton (he/him/his)
  • Call me anything you want; I’m not picky. Call me Evan, Prof. Tilton, Dr. Evan, Hey-You…literally whatever you are comfortable with.
  • Please let us know how you would prefer to be addressed and what pronouns you use.
• Contact: etilton@regis.edu; office: Carroll 108C (inside the Math & Physics suite); office phone: 3034584166 (unreliable)
• Course web pages:
  • http://evantilton.com/ph447f20 - Syllabus
  • WorldClass - Grades, reading surveys
  • Our Slack workspace - Collaboration, solutions, etc. (Invitation link to join the workspace). Please enjoy the giphy integration responsibly.
  • Other sites you’ll likely use:
    • Github
• Class Meetings: Virtual or outdoor
• Office hours: W: 2-4pm, Th: 12-2pm, or by appointment – message me on Slack! Via Zoom whenever possible this semester.

Overview

This upper-division course will cover how one infers scientific knowledge from optical observations. It will include coverage of optics, observational limitations, and statistical techniques. As an analysis lab, experience with version control, Python programming, and analysis methods will be provided.

Tentative schedule

TBD

COVID-19 notice

This course will be some combination of virtual via Zoom and in-person at outdoor locations, as described in class. All students are expected to follow any safety instructions from the university or the instructor immediately.

Prerequisites

Students in PH447 should already have taken the PH304 sequence (introductory physics with calculus). Proficiency in single-variable calculus is assumed. Calculus will be used liberally in all aspects of the course, and it will not be significantly reviewed or re-taught. You should be comfortable using and interpreting derivatives and integrals before starting any upper division physics courses. We will also encounter series and multivariate calculus, though extreme proficiency in these topics will not be assumed. However, exposure to the topics of Calculus III, either in the past or concurrently with this course, will be an advantage.

We will use computational tools to assist us. Students should be comfortable using at least one of the major operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, or Linux). Past exposure to a programming language (e.g., Python, etc) will be helpful but is not required.

All upper division physics courses are interrelated, so we will occasionally discuss topics related to quantum mechanics and electromagnetism, but upper division courses on these topics are not required to take this course.

My Classroom Rules – A Commitment to an Inclusive Classroom

More than anything else, this class is a community that values the diversity of experience that each of us brings to our shared journey in physics. My first priority is the creation of an inclusive classroom - one where everyone feels comfortable, intellectually challenged, and able to speak up about your ideas, struggles, and experiences. Our classroom, as well as its virtual extensions, must foster respect, civility, and an ability to listen. I’ll do my best to reach these goals myself, but it is likely that I will err at times. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to make our classroom a more inclusive and productive learning environment. If anyone in our community is vilating our commitment to inclusivity, please let me know. If I am violating this commitment, I welcome criticism so that I may learn to do better, and I encourage you to let me know. If you don’t feel comfortable talking to me directly about it, you are also welcome to raise the issue with our department chair, Dr. Fred Gray (fgray@regis.edu).

You should expect respect from me and your classmates, and you should also endeavor to be kind and respectful to everyone else. That means a lot of things, including:

• Try not to unnecessarily text, browse the web, or otherwise fiddle with electronic devices during class. It can be rude and distracts everyone, and I may ask you to leave if it is disruptive. This will be a bit tricky, because, if you happen to have one, I’ll sometimes have you use your phone or laptop during class. You must exercise some degree of personal discipline, restricting yourself to physics-relevant activities during our fifty minutes together.
• Listen to your peers, and learn from them. Instead of trying to sound smart, try to raise all voices: pay attention to who is contributing, invite contributions from quieter members of the class, and be conscientious of not dominating the conversation.
• Don’t feign surprise. In a learning environment, it’s important that people feel comfortable saying “I don’t know,” so please don’t act surprised when someone says they don’t know something (e.g., don’t say, “What?! I can’t believe you don’t know what X is!”). Feigning surprise has no social or educational benefit; it only makes others feel worse.
• Similarly, don’t pull a well-actually.” A “well-actually” happens when someone says something that’s almost (but not entirely) correct, and you say something like, “well, actually…” and give a minor correction that serves mainly to make the person delivering the well-actually feel more important. If you feel the need to correct someone, take a moment to consider whether your correction is in the spirit of truth-seeking, rather than grandstanding, and whether it will provide a positive contribution to the discussion.
• Lastly, I have little patience for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and other kinds of bias. Subtle -isms of this sort can be particularly tricky, as they are often unconscious behaviors we engage in by mistake, and are sometimes caused by conflicting norms between cultures. For example, saying “It’s so easy my grandmother could do it” is subtle ageism. If you experience these behaviors during the course, you should feel free to bring it up directly with the person, or if it’s more comfortable, point out the behavior to me, another faculty member, or the Office of Counseling and Personal Development. If someone points out that you have engaged in this behavior, it can be tempting to become defensive, but instead, I ask that you apologize, reflect for a moment, and move on. If you do not understand why issue was taken with your behavior, it is fine to discuss it with me and/or the class in a respectful, inclusive manner so that everyone can learn from the experience.

We all make mistakes with others; the important thing is that we learn from them and use it to help others in the future.

Confidentiality and Mandatory Reporting

College students often experience issues that may interfere with academic success such as academic stress, sleep problems, juggling responsibiities, life events, relationship concerns, or feelings of anxiety, hopelessness, or depression. As your instructor, one of my responsibilities is to help create a safe learning environment and to support you through these situations and experiences.

I also have a mandatory reporting responsibility related to my role as a university employee. It is my goal that you feel able to share information related to your life experiences in classroom discussions, in written work, and in one-on-one meetings, so I will seek to keep information you share private to the greatest extent possible. However, under Title IX and the Clery Act, I am required to share information regarding sexual misconduct, relationship violence, or information about criminal activity on or near Regis’s campus with the university.

If you wish to speak about these issues confidentially, the Office of Counseling and Personal Development (OCPD) can help. OCPD is located in the Coors Life Direction Center, Room 114 and can be contacted by phone 24/7 at 303-458-3507. For more information, see www.regis.edu/ocpd.

Important Notes on Expectations and Success

What You Should Expect

PH 465 covers material at a high level of conceptual and mathematical sophistication.

• Few examples covered in lecture. Most homework problems are not at all similar to examples from class.
• Difficult homework problem sets that sometimes cannot be completed by one individual working alone. Upper division physics students typically report spending a minimum of 10 hours per week on homework at most major universities.
• Challenging exams.
• A great deal of learning that is very rewarding in the end.

PH 465 is a challenging, upper-division physics course. Unlike more introductory courses, you are fully responsible for your own learning. In particular, to some degree, you control the pace of the course by asking questions in class. This means that if you don’t understand something, it is your responsibility to ask questions. Attending class gives you an opportunity to ask questions.

How to Succeed in this Course

The topics that we will cover in PH447 took centuries for humanity to master. Don’t be surprised if you have to think hard and work hard to understand the material. You can perform very well in this class if you do the things necessary to learn physics:- Read the chapter before the lecture. Read extremely carefully; do not skim.

• Read with a pen and notebook; read very actively. Take notes while you read, and work out sample problems and steps of algebra skipped by the author.
• Attend every class.
• Don’t attempt the homework without studying the chapter(s) first.
• Don’t get isolated: Work with your classmates to understand the material, study, and complete problem sets.
• Sometimes do get isolated: After working with classmates, always write up and consolidate your knowledge and solutions alone. test yourself to ensure that you understand.
• Start your homework assignments very early. No one is smart enough to do the homework in the last hour before class, and no one is smart enough to learn the material without working problems.
• Don’t fall behind; you will never catch up.
• Just reading the text, attending lecture, and doing the homework is not enough. You have to understand the material. Test your understanding. If you can explain the material, in words, to someone else, without referring to the text, then you understand. If you can complete a problem you’ve never seen before on your own, then you understand. You may need to do many more problems than just those that are assigned in order to understand. This course is not about memorizing; it’s about understanding.

Self-care

One of the most important aspects of success in fields of high levels of intellectual difficulty is self-care. It is also one of the most neglected.

• Get enough sleep, and do so on a regular schedule. One of the biggest predictors of undergraduate success is sleep habits. For example, give this a read. Pulling all-nighters or similar is not useful at all except in the most basic, memorization-based classes.
• Similarly, take care of yourself in other ways. It is extremely important that you work hard, but working without also having complementary rest, relaxation, and self-care, is rarely very productive intellectually.
• We’ll be using various tools that make it very easy to communicate and collaborate – which is great! Be but careful of letting that become an always-online expectaction. You neither have to be responding to electronic communication all the time, nor should you expect that of your peers or me. It is OK and healthy to mentally check-out from those things regularly!

Course communication

We’ll be using WorldClass for grade distribution, but all other digital communications will take place on our Slack workspace. It will host homework solutions, discussions, and reading quizzes, and you should feel free to chat on it, vent, organize study sessions, etc. I intend to cultivate a rather informal learning community, so you should feel free to make it your space, but please also remember that it is an extension of our classroom at Regis, so you should behave in compliance with the student handbook.

In particular, please note that I will not be answering questions that are purely scientific/mathematical in nature via email. You are welcome to come by my office, ask in class, post on Slack, or contact a peer. I will be enforcing this rule to stress the collaborative nature of physics. You are unlikely to succeed in this class (or any other physics endeavor) on your own; you should make it a priority to support your peers and to accept their help. Collaboration is not only encouraged, it is implicitly required. I strongly suggest that you all frequently get together in person at times in addition to our scheduled meetings to discuss the material of this course.

In all cases, collaboration should be done in a productive, positive, humble, and honest way. You must do so in a way that is both productive for your learning and within the guidelines of the Academic Honor Code. This means that you should never be simply copying or sharing solutions - to do so is both useless for learning and an academic integrity violation. Seriously, don’t cheat, but seriously, help each other. This also means that you should be kind in offering assistance. Be generous, but do not grandstand or belittle. Listen as much as you talk, and always be asking yourself if your conversational approach is truly in service of truth-seeking and care for others.

Course Materials

Required book:

• My lectures notes, which will be updated as we go. The currently available sections are at: all_lectures.pdf

• Wall & Jenkins, Practical Statistics for Astronomers. It is available at the Regis bookstore, as well as most online booksellers.

Course Activities

Readings

Reading is an essential part of PH 447! Reading the text before class is very important. Our class meetings are to clarify your understanding, and to help you make sense of the material. I will assume you have done the required readings in advance and I will not simply lecture aloud about stuff you should have read! It will make a huge difference if you spend the time and effort to carefully read and follow the text.

Homework

The distinction between labs and homework will be somewhat fluid owing to the unusual format.

There will be a homework due intermittently. Homework is arguably the most important part of a physics class – it is where you learn to use the concepts. You should start homework early and work on it consistently. You should treat the assigned problems as the bare minimum number of problems that one could plausibly need to solve to learn material; you should almost certainly be solving more problems than what is assigned for each topic.

You are encouraged to collaborate on difficult homework problems, but you must do so in a way that is both productive for your learning and within the guidelines of the Academic Honor Code. This means that you should never be simply copying or sharing solutions - to do so is both useless for learning and an academic integrity violation. Seriously, don’t cheat. You have no idea how easy it is to spot for your physics professors - the only question is when they decide to enforce it. Don’t gamble your whole academic career on saving some time on a homework problem. Instead, first take some time alone to attempt each problem and create your own ideas as to how they might be solved. Once you’re stuck, get together with classmates to brainstorm, talk through the problems, and work through a viable solution strategy. Finally, separate from the group, and write up a solution on your own, filling in the details. Remember, if you can’t solve similar problems on your own without help, then you haven’t learned the material and will not succeed on the exams or in real-life applications. Test yourself and, most importantly, be honest with yourself! For all assignments, the work you turn in must in the end be your own: in your own words, reflecting your own understanding. If, at any time, for any reason, you feel disadvantaged or isolated, contact me and I can discretely try to help arrange study groups.

You should cite any and all external assistance that you receive on any work - in fact, you should do this everywhere in life! If Angeline Kumar and Gunnarr Skuld helped you with part of a problem, then add a note to that effect (e.g., “Gunnar and I came up with the main idea of the solution together, and Angeline pointed out to me that we were counting the degrees of freedom incorrectly.”). If everyone, when hopelessly stuck, looked at the Wikipedia page for the “Ideal Gas Law” and happened to see a major piece of the solution, cite it explicitly. We all need help with physics sometimes, but we also need to both acknowledge that help and build on it with original thinking of our own.

No late homeworks will be accepted. If you have an illness, family emergency, or similar excused reason for not completing an assignment, then you will be excused from that assignment. It is your resonsibility to go back and work the problems as soon as you can.

Computational Homework Problems

There will be some use of computation in this course on homework problems. You will need to use Python. You do not need any computational experience for this course as you will learn some fundamentals early on and keep using them throughout the course. Python is used across the sciences as well as private industry, so learning it will serve you well in your future work, no matter what it is. Artists use Python, teachers use Python, data analysts use Python, sports teams use Python, and physicists use Python. I suggest downloading the Anaconda distribution of Python as it comes with all the packages you will need to get up and running with Jupyter notebooks, but you are welcome to use any other method of running Python code as well.

I intend for everyone to use Github to manage their code. (However, as always, if this workflow places an undue burden on you for any reason, talk to me! We’ll find a solution.) As you become involved with computational or analytic activities in the professional world, you’ll find that people expect you to manage your code and documents professionally, too. The standard way of doing so is with git repositories (“repos”), often stored online on Github for easy sharing, distribution, and collaboration. You should make a Github account if you do not already have one; as with Slack, you are welcome to use a throwaway email address if you do not want to share your primary one. (However, both Slack and Github are very standard tools – if you think you might have involvement with any technical field or hobby in the future, I recommend making an account that you’ll be able to easily use for many years in many contexts.)

If you get stuck with the technological aspects of the class, don’t be afraid to ask for help on Slack, come see me, or Google it (as should usually be your first recourse).

Grading and Exams

Your course grade is determined as shown:

Owing to the small class size and the inaccuracy of predicting grade distributions on upper division physics exam problems, the final mapping of letter grades to numerical scores will likely be revised at the end of the semester. However, as a rough guide, you should expect score distributions approximately as follows:

I reserve the right to assign higher grades than would result from this table according to my judgment of the difficulty of the assignments and exams. No final grades will be adjusted or curved downward relative to the above table under any circumstance. For example, if everyone earned above an 88%, then everyone would get an A, so it is in your interest to work together and help each other learn physics.

Participation

You are expected to attend and fully participate in every class, both for your own learning and out of respect for your classmates. During class, we will have concept questions, tutorials, and other activities that are graded for participation (not correctness).

There will be a brief reading survey due prior to each class which will also contribute a small amount to this category. I reserve the right to give unannounced in-class quizzes; it is highly unlikely that this will happen if the class is mostly keeping up with the reading and homework, but if significant non-participation occurs I will begin giving them without warning (I have never had to do this so far in my teaching career – let’s keep it that way!). There may also be other in-class activities that contribute to this category, depending on the difficulties and interests we encounter along the way.

Exams

There will be one midterm exam and a final exam. All exams are cumulative. Details about exam format will be given in class.

All exams are cumulative of everthing covered so far in the course, as well as mathematics through calculus and the introductory physics sequence. Physics is inherently cumulative, always.

Further Policies

Additional syllabus policies, including all university-wide policies, are enumerated here.