The following tips were collected by Peter Hahn (’02) for the benefit of future students of Physics 229

Instructors disclaimer: I’m not endorsing everything in here, but there’s a lot of truth to be found.

1) From day one (or two), find a group of people you can work with, either friends, people you already know well, or people you have never met before – it doesn’t matter, you’re going to get to know them a lot better in the coming semester. Make an e-Mail list of them, and then you can just keep hitting “reply all” to figure out when you’re going to meet – yes, you’ll be doing that often enough to keep them up on your current Inbox.

2) Ask that question that’s on your mind. This time I guarantee it’s on someone else’s.

3) Do not wait until two days before it’s due to start the HW. Even if you just glance at it and jot some completely wrong stuff down, it’ll put you much farther on your way than you realize. It’ll help in knowing what questions to ask, how hard the problem will be, and what everyone else is talking about when they say, “Yah, it all works out if you assume that the barometric pressure equation holds for tree sap…”

4) Get to know that Gaussian distribution. It will become your closest friend and your bitterest enemy in the first three weeks or so of this course.

5) When Prof. Battle gives you a story/fable/parable about probabilities, WRITE IT DOWN. Chances are: a) he’ll refer back to it again and again later and you want to know what he’s talking about, b) it’ll help you understand what 1% of the population understand about probability theory, c) you’re not going to find any story telling in Kittel & Kroemer – I also guarantee that. Look out especially for the “This room has so many quarters and the room next door has also some number of quarters” story.

6) If you read over even just the bolded words and the neatest (most final form) equations, it’ll help you with 75% of the daily “pop” quizzes you’ll get on the readings.

7) Read “Thermal Physics” – if you have the time, the second opinion from the much more conversational Schroeder will pay big dividends.

8) Heat and Temperature are very intimately related – but they are NOT the same thing! That is why you can hold a block of glowing Space Shuttle heat shielding tile in your hand and you won’t burn yourself*

*- Do not hold it immediately after you retrieve it from the kiln or after cutting it in half. Do not try this at home, come to think of it.

9) There will be at least one problem you will not be able to even imagine doing at first.

10) There will be at least one problem that you’ll cut through like butter, but it’ll probably be on the first HW.

11) Remember, “The chances of something happening.” can also be thought of as, “One minus the chances of that thing not happening.” ( Probability of this happening = 1 – Probability of this not happening)

12) Stat. Mech. Begins very counter intuitively, and generalizes to the most obvious of results. Some of you may find this pleasing; most of you will at some point.

13) Your calculator will not handle Planck’s constant to the third power because it only works with two digit exponents. Instead, cube the number itself and then work with the exponents separately by hand. And pay attention because it can drastically affect the “order of magnitude” of your result.

14) Remember, in large large numbers, things can be approximated more simply – but you’ll have to justify dropping terms. This also applies to Taylor Series expansions – which can and will be used throughout the text to help simplify things. If something is very close to zero, the higher order terms drop out, if something is very large, the lower order terms drop out, but in either case, it should be obvious why they drop out.

15) In any problem where Kittel and Kroemer ask you to prove some kind of relation,

and there will be many, it’s always a good bet that you can get that derivation a heck of a lot more easily if you work backwards and start with the solution and work back to some equation you can get out of the chapter.