Essential Physics

Throughout the Decade of the 1990’s, Professor Firk Taught a One-year Course of a Specialized Nature to Students Who Entered Yale College with Excellent Preparation in Mathematics and the Physical Sciences, and Who Expressed an Interest in Physics or a Closely Related Field. the Students Were Required to Take the Highest Level of Introductory Mathematics in Parallel with the Course. the Book Covers Topics Taught in the First Semester; They Include: 1. Mathematical Preliminaries 2. Kinematics: the Geometry of Motion 3. Classical and Special Relativity 4. Newtonian Dynamics 5. Invariance Principles and Conservation Laws 6. Einsteinian Dynamics 7. Newtonian Gravitation 8. Einsteinian Gravitation: Introduction to General Relativity 9. the Calculus of Variations 10. Chaos 11. Wave Motion 12. Orthogonal Functions and Fourier Series Appendix : Solving Ordinary Differential Equations