Physics 374 Project
A project is a major part of a student’s responsibilities in Physics 374. In this project you will be
required to study a nontrivial problem using both analytic and numerical methods.
I recommend that you study the undamped physical pendulum in the unbounded regime where
(the energy is greater than maximum value of the potential energy). You may do a project
studying a different system if you wish but you must clear the topic with me. You should work
independently on this project. If you get stuck it is perfectly legitimate to seek help from me,
from fellow students, or from other knowledgeable people provided that they do not do the work
for you. You may also consult the literature. You must however acknowledge any outside help
in the paper and cite the literature.
Topic Selection: If you wish to work on a topic other than the physical pendulum you
must let me get my approval by October 13.
Progress Report/ : You are required to submit a progress report of approximately 1-2
Rough Draft pages by November 10. Some progress is required by this date.
Minimally, you must indicate exactly what calculations you plan to do
ultimately and indicate what progress has been on these calculations. I
strongly recommend that you complete all your calculations by this date
and write up a rough draft of the final report. If you do this I will make
comments on it to allow you to strengthen the project and get it back to
you by November 17 .
Final Paper: The final report is due November 24.
Paper write up: You should write this up as though it were a scientific article for a
scientific journal. You should include an abstract, an introductory
section, a description of the analysis in one or more sections and a
conclusion. You may also include appendices in which you
include gory mathematical details and/or Mathematica code. It is
often useful to segregate the grungy details into an appendix to
make the paper more readable. The paper should also cite any references
used and acknowledge any outside help.
The paper should be written at a level accessible to students in this class.
The paper should be well written with all of the physical and
mathematical issues clearly explained. The paper should be typed.
Equations can either be handwritten in or include using a word processor.
I expect the final paper to be somewhere between 10-20 pages
(excluding any Mathematica code included) although this is only a rough
guideline.
Grading: The paper will be graded both for the scientific content and for the
clarity of explanation. The grading will be modeled in part on Olympic
diving scoring---I will include the “degree of difficulty” of the project.
