[G, SC] This class will address the relationship between two of the most compelling phenomena in world politics in the aftermath of the Cold War: civil war and climate change. Civil wars have far surpassed international conflict as the primary sources of battle-related deaths in the past decade, while anthropogenic climate change has long been debated as one of the major contemporary challenges. The class will be divided in two main parts.

[LP, IL, SC] Violence lies at the very heart of both political institutions such as the state, as well as the expression of political beliefs.  Focusing on domestic rather than international forms of conflict, this course will address questions of what violence is, how it is organized in society, and what it means to those who use it.  We will first identify ways to think about violence as a political activity – why do actors choose violent over non-violent means of resisting governments or expressing dissent?  Is violence ever rational?  What purposes does it serv

Independent Reading Course. A full course.

Fall and spring semester.

(Offered as PHYS 400, BIOL 400, BCBP 400, and CHEM 400.) How do the physical laws that dominate our lives change at the small length and energy scales of individual molecules? What design principles break down at the sub-cellular level and what new chemistry and physics becomes important? We will answer these questions by looking at bio-molecules, cellular substructures, and control mechanisms that work effectively in the microscopic world. How can we understand both the static and dynamic shape of proteins using the laws of thermodynamics and kinetics?

Wave-particle duality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Basic postulates of Quantum Mechanics, wave functions, solutions of the Schroedinger equation for one-dimensional systems and for the hydrogen atom. Three class hours per week.

Requisite: PHYS 225 and 343 or consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Professor Jagannathan.

The basic laws of physics governing the behavior of microscopic particles are in certain respects simple. They give rise both to complex behavior of macroscopic aggregates of these particles, and more remarkably, to a new kind of simplicity. Thermodynamics focuses on the simplicity at the macroscopic level directly, and formulates its laws in terms of a few observable parameters like temperature and pressure.

A variety of classic and topical experiments will be performed. In the area of fundamental constants, we will undertake a measurement of the speed of light, a determination of the ratio of Planck’s constant to the charge of the electron through the study of the photoelectric effect, and an experiment to obtain the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron. We will study the wave nature of the electron through a diffraction experiment. An experiment to measure optical spectra and another on gamma ray spectra will reveal the power of spectroscopy for exploring the structure of matter.

In the mid-nineteenth century, completing nearly a century of work by others, Maxwell developed an elegant set of equations describing the dynamical behavior of electromagnetic fields. A remarkable consequence of Maxwell’s equations is that the wave theory of light is subsumed under electrodynamics. Moreover, we know from subsequent developments that the electromagnetic interaction largely determines the structure and properties of ordinary matter. The course will begin with Coulomb’s Law but will quickly introduce the concept of the electric field.