Skip to main content
Back to top
Ctrl
+
K
Quarks, Spacetime, and the Big Bang
Welcome to Quarks, Spacetime, and the Big Bang!
Foundations
1. Lesson 1: A Little Bit About This On-line Text
1.1. What Quarks, Spacetime, and the Big Bang Isn’t
1.2. What Quarks, Spacetime, and the Big Bang Is
1.3. The Great Scientist Theory
1.4. How I Think About You and Me
1.5. How Deep Do We Go?
1.6. Let’s Go!
2. Lesson 2: Once Upon a Time…
3. Lesson 3: What I’ll Bet You Know Already
3.1. Remembering Motion
3.2. Some Mathematics
3.3. Energy
3.4. Matter
4. Lesson 4: Mathematics, The M Word
4.1. A Little Bit of Descartes
4.2. The M Word
4.3. Functions, the QS&BB Way
4.4. A Gentle Review 1: Skills You’ll Frequently Need
4.5. Geometry: Vectors, Curves…Formulas From Your Past?
4.6. A Gentle Review 2: Skills for Only a Few Times
4.7. What to Remember from Lesson 3
5. Lesson 5:
Motion, Getting From Here to There
5.1. A Little Bit of Galileo
5.2. The Medieval Version of Here to There: A Little Bit of Aristotle
5.3. Getting From Here to There: At Constant Speed
5.4. Calculating a Speed
5.5. Multiplication and Geometry
5.6. Now For Something Completely Different: Feynman Diagrams
5.7. Back to Galileo: Acceleration
5.8. The Equations of Constant Acceleration
5.9. Acceleration, In Everyday Terms
5.10. Special Kinds of Acceleration
5.11. The Pendulum
5.12. Going In the Right Direction!
5.13. Projectiles
5.14. The Beginning of Physics
5.15. What to Remember from Lesson 5
6. Lesson 6:
The Big Mo, Force and Momentum
6.1. A Little Bit of Newton
6.2. Impulse: Getting Going
6.3. Newton’s Mass
6.4. The “Quantity of Motion”: Momentum
6.5. Newton’s Famous Three laws
6.6. Newton’s Second law
6.7. Weight
6.8. Finally, Nothing: Forces in Balance
6.9. Circular Motion
6.10. What to Remember from Lesson
7. Lesson 7: Collisions, Banging Things Together
7.1. A Little Bit of Huygens
7.2. Varieties of Collisions
7.3. Ideal Collisions
7.4. Quantum-like Collisions
7.5. Impulse and Momentum Conservation and the Third law
7.6. The Simplest Collision of All, Everyday and Quantum Mechanically
7.7. Collision Diagrams: Same Song, Different Verse
7.8. Algebra by Thermometers!
7.9. Two and More Dimensions
7.10. What to Remember from Lesson
8. Lesson 8: Energy
8.1. Ability to Do Damage: Kinetic Energy
8.2. Work
8.3. That Stop Shot
8.4. Energy Conservation
8.5. Eager to Do Damage: Potential Energy
8.6. Okay, But What Is It…Really?
8.7. The Exchange of Potential and Kinetic Energies
8.8. Energy and Momentum, From 50,000 Feet
8.9. What to Remember from Lesson
9. Lesson 9: Early Cosmology
9.1. A Little Bit of Kepler
9.2. Ancient Astronomy
9.3. Greeks, Measuring Stuff
9.4. Putting the Sun Where It (almost) Belongs: Copernicus
9.5. Revolutionibus and Scandal
9.6. Astronomy, If It Ain’t Baroque, Don’t Fix It: Tycho
9.7. Kepler’s Battle With Mars
9.8. What to Remember from Lesson
10. Lesson 10: Galileo’s Astronomy and Newton’s Gravitation
10.1. A Little Bit More of Galileo
10.2. What Galileo Saw!
10.3. The Apple Moment: Newton’s Gravity
10.4. What’s the Moon’s Centripetal Acceleration?
10.5. Now Think Big!
10.6. Universal Gravitation
10.7. The Gravitation Constant
10.8. Gravitational Energy
10.9. Three Problems for Newton
10.10. Cosmology Begins
10.11. What to Remember from Lesson
11. Lesson 11: Charge It! Charges and Magnets
11.1. A Little of Gilbert
11.2. Magnetism
11.3. Electricity: Poor Richard
11.4. Forces from Electricity: Coulomb’s Law
11.5. Forces from Currents: Electromagnetism
11.6. Inverse Square “laws”
11.7. Modern Ideas
11.8. What to Remember from Lesson 11
12. Lesson 12: Faraday’s Experiments and An Extraordinary Idea
12.1. A Little Bit of Faraday
12.2. Faraday’s Experiments in Electricity and Magnetism
12.3. Induction
12.4. The Field
12.5. Faraday’s Health
12.6. What to Remember from Lesson
13. Lesson 13: Faraday’s E&M Fields
13.1. A Tiny Bit More of Faraday
13.2. The Electric Field
13.3. The Revolutionary Idea of a Field
13.4. Electric Field for Other Configurations
13.5. Energy In Electric Fields
13.6. Electron Volts
13.7. Magnetic Fields
13.8. What to Remember from Lesson
14. Lesson 14: Waves and Maxwell’s Fields
14.1. A Little Bit of Maxwell
14.2. Wave Goodbye
14.3. Maxwell’s Idea of the Field: Maxwell’s Equations
14.4. The Jelly of the Ether
14.5. The Speed of Light, Old School
14.6. Maxwell’s Insight and Electromagnetic Waves
14.7. A Modern Summary of Maxwell’s Results
14.8. So What Gets an EM Wave Going?
14.9. Charged Particles in Electromagnetic Fields
14.10. The Lorentz Force, Broken Down
14.11. What to Remember from Lesson
Relativity
15. Lesson 15: Special Relativity, 1
15.1. A Little Bit About Michelson
15.2. That Zero
15.3. Moving Through The Ether
15.4. The Fallout of Michelson’s Null Result
15.5. Getting Serious: The Michelson-Morley Experiment
15.6. Michelson and Chicago
15.7. More Trouble With Light
15.9. Frames of Reference, For Real
15.10. What to Remember from Lesson 15
16. Lesson 16:
Special Relativity, 2
16.1. A Little Bit About Einstein
16.2. A Different Way Out: Einstein’s Relativity Paper
16.3. What Was the Cause of That Storm? The Second Postulate’s Implications
16.4. Queue: The Soapbox.
16.5. Double Down on the Second Postulate
16.6. Time Dilation
16.7. Length Contraction
16.8. Let’s Summarize
16.9. Is Relativity the Case?
16.10. What to Remember from Lesson 16
17. Lesson 17:
Special Relativity, 3
17.1. A Little Bit about Lorentz
17.2. Lorentz Transformations
17.3. Maxwell’s Equations, Revisited
17.4. Speeds in Special Relativity
17.5. What to Remember from Lesson 17
18. Lesson 18:
Special Relativity, 4
18.1. A Little Bit of Minkowski
18.2. Working Our Way toward Relativistic Energy
18.3. The Rubber Meets the Road: Particle Creation and Potential Energies
18.4. Isn’t Anything Constant??
18.5. Spacetime
18.6. The Aftermath
18.7. Is Relativity The Case?
18.8. What To Remember from Lesson 18
Repository
Open issue
Index