Physics 112
Physics 112 is the thermodynamics course. It is a four unit course.
Overview
Physics 112, or Statistical Mechanics is all about the physics of many particles. Many of the problems that you saw in your introductory physics classes involve only a few bodies in motion, like a ball rolling down a plane or a charge from a rod acting on a test particle. But in practice, all of the systems we see in the world around us are not like that: there's an unimaginable amount of atoms in the world around us. This course teaches you all about physics with many bodies. Similarly to Physics 5C, it starts off with methods used to count the distribution of energy states within the system under various conditions and derives the principles of thermodynamics from them, but goes into greater depth and detail, doing everything from defining temperature and entropy to deriving the specific heat of solids and modeling how heat engines work. The material in this course has applications to astrophysics, condensed matter, biophysics, and other fields.
Prerequisites
Physics 5A, Physics 5B, and Physics 5C or Physics 7A, Physics 7B, and Physics 7C.
Student Comments
“The first third of the class is about classical thermodynamics, concluding with a midterm about classical thermodynamics. The rest of the course is statistical mechanics. Charman will teach some 105 and 137A stuff in lectures as well as some basic Bayesian statistics. Don’t worry if you didn’t do well on one of his tests, the average is (historically) low (below 50%) anyway and he will make the exams you do well weight more than the exams you didn’t do so well in the final grade. His problem sets are long and can be challenging but people still get very high percentage on problem sets.” – Andrew Hsu, undergraduate physics/astrophysics
“I took 112 with Holzapfel and it was hands down the most eye-opening physics class I have taken. One of my favorite moments in the class was deriving the ideal gas law (PV = NkT) from scratch and it was so simple and elegant. The homework could be long and algebra-laden at times, and Taylor expansion and various other approximations will become your best friend. I’d honestly take it again just for fun. To me it was the upper div physics class that required the least difficult math, but I did suck at 137/linear algebra so take my advice with a grain of salt?” – Aini Xu, undergraduate physics/computer science