Physics on your feet. Berkeley Graduate Exam Questions PDF
Preview Physics on your feet. Berkeley Graduate Exam Questions
• • ( BERKELEY GRADUATE EXAM QUESTIONS Ninety Minuteso f Shante but a P/1Dfo r tire Resto f YourL ife! 01· ~ \ , \;' ........ DMITRY BUDKER & \.~I l ALEXANDER 0. SUSHKOV ~ ILLUSTRATED BY VASILIKI DEMAS ,.. ., • PHYSICS ON YOCR FEET: BERKELEY GRADUATE EXAM QUESTIONS Physics on Your Feet: Berkeley Graduate Exam Questions or Ninety Minutes of Shatne but a PhD for the Rest of Your Life! Dmitry Budker University of Cahfornia, Berkeley, USA and Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany Alexander 0. Sushkov Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Illustrated by Vasiliki Demas OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Dmitry Budker, Alexander 0. Sushkov, and Vasiliki Demas 2015 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address abo\·e You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014944463 ISBN 978-0-19-968165-5 (hbk.) ISBN 978-0-19-968166-2 (pbk.) Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. To those who are not afraid to ask and those brave enough to answer ... Preface How this book came about In May 2010, the Physics Department of the University of California at Berkeley where the two of us, at different times, had been Ph.D. students, abandoned the Preliminary Oral Examinations, a.k.a. oral prelims, for the first-year graduate students, thus breaking a 60-year long tradition. In fact, oral examinations were offered at the Berkeley Physics Department much earlier, however, their most recent format and scope more or less settled by 1950, as described by A. C. Helmholz in his History of the Physics Depart1nent. 1950-1968 (Helmholz, 2004). The Berkeley prelim was a scary experience for those of us on the "receiving end (A.S.)," and a half-day semi-annual chore for those administering the test (D.B. did this from Fall of 199 5 through Spring of 201 O; he "missed" taking the oral prelims as he entered the Berkeley Physics graduate program in 19 89 as a continuing student, but has had his share of oral examinations elsewhere). Nevertheless, the two of us strongly feel that this has been extremely useful for the students, providing them, perhaps, the first "real-life" scientific-communication experience, and giving an opportunity to look at the beautiful world of physics in some approximation of completeness. It has also been a truly rewarding experience for the faculty member (D.B.). One learned a lot from the brilliant students, and from the wise colleagues asking truly in teresting and profound questions. Some of the material of this book is drawn from the notes taken by D.B. at the exams over the years, as well as from the questions collected by the students and passed as an exam-preparation aid "generation to generation." The origin of the content of the book, therefore, has a collective nature, and we are extremely grateful to the members of the Berkeley physics faculty who have generously allowed us to use their ideas. Unfortunately, many of our sources are no longer alive to ask for permission. We remain in deep gratitude to Professors David Judd, Gil Shapiro, Ronald Ross, and, indirectly, many others. So what is the point of the book now that the Berkeley orals are no more? We hope this collection will be useful to students ( of all ages and everywhere) who wish to refresh and/or test their knowledge of physics, and also to students at the universities that still administer orals. And there are always written prelims, qualifying exams, even at Berke ley (at least, for now). The level of the readers we primarily aim at is upper-division undergraduates and first-year graduate students, although some of these problems will certainly be enjoyed by postdocs and distinguished physics faculty, looking for a fun break from or an unexpected contribution to their research. viii Preface We have had a lot of fun writing up the problems for this book, and we would like our readers to share this joy (rather than stress out about the upcoming exam, which is unproductive). We are greatly assisted in this by the eye-pleasing drawings prepared by our skillful illustrator, Dr. Vasiliki (Vicky) Demas. A bullet with Mass M is fired with velocity v on.to a wooden. block) an.d gets stuck in. the process. It loses kin.etic en.er9y of half W\v2-. The question. is: what happen.s to the other half? Other books There are several other collections of problems with the scope and goals partially overlapping with ours. Among these are the following. • Scattering and structures by Povh and Rosina (2005), which is a lovely collection of problems for the German oral Diploma and Ph.D. exams with emphasis on quantum phenomena. • A guide to physics problems by Cahn, Mahan, and Nadgorny (1994), which is a wonderful collection of written examination problems, also supplied with many delightful cartoons (not to mention the most insightful physics). • An impressive multi-volume Problems and solutions set by a group of Chinese au thors (Zhang, Zhou, Zhang, and Lim, 1995; Lim, 1998; Bai, Guo, Lim, 1991; Lim, 2000) compiled by the Physics Coaching Class at the University of Science and Technology in China as a guide for preparation to Ph.D. exams at major Amer ican universities. While this collection appears to be very useful, we find the choice of questions and style of solutions to be substantially different from our own.
The list of books you might like
