Special Topics in Classical Mechanics
Instructor: Professor P.C. Deshmukh, Department of Physics, IIT Madras. This course has grown out of the first course in Physics taught to engineering students at IIT-Madras. However, the contents are expanded to include the interests of students of basic sciences and a strong emphasis on the foundations of classical mechanics is aimed at. Essentially, foundations of 'classical mechanics' would include a comprehensive introduction to Newtonian, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics, and include an introduction to mechanics of a system of particles, fluid mechanics, introduction to 'chaos', to the special theory of relativity and also to electrodynamics. The course is designed as the first-course students would take after high school, and the scope of some of the advanced topics that are introduced is therefore restricted. A comfortable introduction, adequately rigorous but not overly involved, to advanced applications, is attempted. In this course, we emphasize that 'observation' and 'measurements' play a fundamental role in Physics. We introduce mathematical methods as and where needed, but keep the focus on physical principles. The course aims, even as it will provide a rigorous introduction to the foundations of classical mechanics, at discovering the romance in physics, beauty in its simplicity, and rigor in its formulation. Read more