Syllabus: Course Outline and Learning Goals The outline outline below should help give you the big picture of what we'll discuss in the course. You may want to refer back to this during the course to see how the current topic fits into the big picture, and also to see where we're going. Some of the sections will probably make more sense after we've begun discussing a topic. The second part gives the detailed learning goals for each sub-topic which hopefully is useful when preparing for the course and revising. PART I: SPECIAL RELATIVITY Newton's laws and relativity To begin, we'll review Newton's laws and point out that if these are true for one person, they are equally true for anyone else moving at a constant velocity relative to that person. So two people moving at some constant relative velocity will experience exactly the same laws of mechanics. This means that if the two people set up identical (mechanical) experiments, they will obtain identical results. It is then impossible to come up with any mechanical experiment to measure absolute velocity, since such an experiment would have to give different results for people moving at different velocities. Thus, at least from the point of view of mechanics, only relative velocities have any practical meaning, and this is what is meant by the "principle of relativity". Puzzles from electromagnetism We'll then review some basic electricity and magnetism and recall how light arises as an electromagnetic wave. Since the equations of electromagnetism (Maxwell's Equations) predict a specific value for the speed of light, it seems like the principle of relativity must be violated for electricity and magnetism: according to the usual rules of adding velocities, if the speed of light is u kilometres per hour as measured by one person, it would be u+v kilometres per hour as measured by a person moving toward the light source with velocity v kilometres per hour. If this is correct, only one of these two people could possibly observe the value predicted by electromagnetism. We could then