Top-Down Physics

Over the past 7 years I have worked to develop two, two- semester course sequences in Theoretical and Computational Physics. Covering material traditionally handled in Classical Mechanics and Electricity and Magnetism, the Theoretical Physics sequence stresses mathematical rigor, physical insight and a project-based paradigm, covering topics such as “Landing on the Moon,” “Realistic Tidal Models,” and “The Solar Sail.” A two-volume text (recently adopted by Mercer University) has been developed for the Computational Physics sequence and introduces students to the essentials of Maple, LaTeX and JAVA as well as web-page (HTML, JavaScript) publishing. While the bulk of the first semester is devoted to software use and algorithm development (i.e., numerical integration) wrote homework is supplemented by ``group’’ quiz and project activities. In the second semester laboratory experiments such as the “Toothpick Toss”, “The Not-So-Simple Harmonic Oscillator” and the “Chaotic Diode” are performed and then computational simulations are developed using various tools (i.e., JAVA, Visual Basic, Matlab).