Midterm Review Questions
The midterm examination will be held in session #12, in class. The format will be closed-book and closed-notes, with a variety of types of questions, including some terms to identify and some short answer questions. The exam will be comprised of questions based on some of these topics, and will contribute 25% of your final course grade.
1. What was the Maxwellians’ "mechanical worldview"? What was the 19th century German theorists’ "electrodynamic worldview"?
2. Using a Minkowski diagram, demonstrate the relativity of simultaneity. Similarly, using pictures of a light-clock as seen by observers in different inertial reference frames, derive Einstein’s formula for time-dilation. What does the time-dilation formula, Δt’ = γΔt, mean in words? How does the factor γ depend on the ratio (v/c)?
3. Discuss some of the ways Einstein was and was not proceeding along Machian lines in his 1905 paper on special relativity.
4. What was the Michelson-Morley experiment? What did it aim to measure? How did physicists such as Lorentz and Poincare react to its results? How could its results be explained by special relativity?
5. How did other physicists, such as Minkowski and Cunningham, read and appropriate Einstein’s special relativity paper?
6. What was "general" about Einstein’s "general relativity"? What does the equivalence principle imply about accelerated motions and gravitational fields? What did Einstein think the theory implied about the geometrical structure of the universe? What were the three "classic" tests of the theory?
7. What was Niels Bohr’s model of the atom? In what specific ways did the model break with classical physics? How did Louis de Broglie’s work relate to Bohr’s? How does the de Broglie wavelength vary with an object’s mass and velocity? On what scales does such "waviness" becomes relevant?
8. Discuss Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. What are some of the different ways in which the principle has been interpreted?
9. Define Niels Bohr’s correspondence principle and complementarity.
10. Describe the two principles underlying the EPR argument ("reality criterion" and "separability"), and discuss some of the ways Bohr countered this argument.
11. What was Bell’s result, and why was it significant? How does Mermin’s thought experiment represent Bell’s result, and what conclusions can be drawn concerning particles’ possession of determinate properties?
12. What is Paul Forman’s thesis? What kinds of evidence does he use to defend his position? Discuss some objections to it.