Course Description
This course is one of the three foundational PHYSICS courses for the first year of Engineering and Sciences undergraduates and seeks to provide the students with the basics of mechanics. In addition, a thorough grounding in this course helps tackle many more courses in the undergraduate program involving applications of vectors, rotational kinematics, rigid body motion and relativity.
In the current semester, the course will run fully in the online mode. Course material, including video lectures, course handouts and assignments, shall be made available to you in advance. you shall go through the course material as per the schedule. This course will be of total ~40 lectures and ~10 tutorials. There will be one live session on every Monday during 15:00-15:50 hrs, to discuss any course related doubts (defined as Discussion Hour). There will also be one live session on every Thursday during 15:00-15:50 hrs, to learn solving problems based on the material covered in the previous week (defined as Tutorial Hour). Along with the tutorial problems, a home assignment sheet containing 5-6 problems will be given every week which must be submitted within a week. In addition, there will be a discussion forum where you can post any doubt/question which can be answered by anyone of you, including instructors.
IIT Kanpur’s mooKIT web platform will be used to run the course. All course material will be uploaded on mooKIT website weekly. In video lectures, there will be several in-video questions, which must be answered while watching the lectures. These questions will only be for reflection and not be used for grading. Students should submit (upload) their home assignments through mooKIT only. All quizzes will also be conducted through mooKIT.
Course Content
Transformation of Scalars and Vectors under Rotation, Form Invariance of Newtons Second Law, Forces in Nature; Solving Newtons Equations of Motion in Polar Coordinates for problems including Constraint and Friction, extension to Cylindrical and Spherical Coordinates; Potential Energy Function, Conservative and Non Conservative Forces; Central Forces, Energy Equation and Diagrams, Elliptical, Parabolic, and Hyperbolic Orbits, Harmonic Oscillator with Damping, Forced Oscillations and Resonance, inclusion of Nonlinear Force and Chaotic Motion, Phase Space Description; Non Inertial Frames of Reference, Centrifugal and Coriolis Forces, Weather Systems, Foucault Pendulum; Angular Momentum and Torque, Rigid Body Dynamics, Moment of Inertia Tensor, Principal Axes, Torque Free Precession, Gyroscopes, Eulers Equations; Special Relativity, Lorentz Transformation, Length Contraction, Time Dilation, Velocity Addition, Relativistic Dynamics, Energy Mass Relation.