PARADIGM:   CENTRAL FORCES

Open Website

Welcome to the Central Forces Paradigm open website. Here you can view a selection of materials which are being developed for this course. The rest of the materials are password protected, to preserve our copyright during development. If you are interested in further information, particularly if you might be interested in trying some of our materials in your classroom, please contact:

Corinne Manogue
Professor of Physics
Weniger 301
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331-6507
541-737-1695
corinne@physics.oregonstate.edu

Sample Text Materials

Classical Mechanics of Central Forces

This is the "text" for the first third of the course. It is currently used in conjunction with Marion and Thornton, Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, 4th edition, Chapter 5.

Table of Contents for Angular Momentum and Spherical Harmonics.

Nearing completion, this is the "text" for the middle third of the course. It is used independently of any commercial text.

The Hydrogen Atom

Sorry, this "text" for the last third of the course currently exists only in the mind of the author.

Sample Active Engagement Activities    (Require pdf)

Potential Energy Diagrams. In this is activity, students observe a puck on an air table, attached to a central post by a short piece of rubber band, a thread, and a piece of masking tape. The students are asked to explore and describe the motion and its relationship to potential energy diagrams. In a series of related activities and homework exercises, they are led, by the end of the week, to understand the need to generalize to effective potential diagrams.

Sample Visualization Activities   (Require Maple, Release 6)

flatylm.mws.  The eigenstates for the hydrogen atom are complicated, both mathematically and geometrically. In order to help students understand these complexities, the materials in this paradigm build up to the hydrogen eigenstates slowly, by first considering a particle restricted to a ring and then a particle restricted to the surface of a sphere. These later solutions are just the spherical harmonics, normally represented by polar plots. Unfortunately, polar plots of the spherical harmonics look so much like electron orbitals that students become confused about the role of the radial coordinate. To avoid confusion, this Maple worksheet graphs the probability densities for a particle restricted to the surface of a sphere using color rather than radius to depict the value of the spherical harmonic.