HearstMining said:

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I suffered through the Physics 4 series - barely understood anything after mechanics and E&M (sort of).

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When did you take Physics 4? I loved it in 1967-68, it was so different from anything I had ever seen before. I'm sure it helped that I came in late and was a quarter ahead in math. I still use material from three of the texts (Purcell, Crawford, Reif) in my classes though I think Kleppner & Kolenkow wrote a much better mechanics book (in the following decade) and Feynman wrote a much better quantum book. Altogether Physics 4 was the best academic experience I've ever had. But by being focused on physics as seen and used by physicists it wasn't all that helpful to students in other fields and was replaced by a more traditional sequence. I think it survives in some form as an honors option.

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As far as math, I really didn't really internalize many of the concepts until I encountered them in my engineering classes. I was one of those people who rarely understood concepts in the abstract but if I did enough problems, I sort of internalized the concepts and then was in good shape.

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My last math course was 104A (real analysis), that wasn't something I could figure out how to apply. However I remember feeling pretty smug one day in Econ 101 when some proof depended on whether a set was open or closed and I understood why.

SFCityBear said:

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I had a good experience overall with Physics 4, which I took in 1960-61, I believe. I liked 4A which was Mechanics, always a strong suit of mine.

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In my time we were on quarters. 4A was still mechanics but emphasized particles rather than rigid bodies and included special relativity.

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Physics 4B, Electricity and Magnetism, was a different matter.

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My 4B was also E&M but all theory, no circuits. It used the special relativity from 4A to explain magnetism, that was an eye-opener to me.

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I had a lot of experience with electronics as a kid, growing up in the era transitioning from vacuum tubes to transistors. I was always taking radios apart to find out how they worked, and constructing circuits of all kinds.

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You're in good company with Richard Feynman.

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Professor Anderson went on to have a very successful career as a physicist.

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I had Nobel laureate Owen Chamberlain for 4C. Lower division teaching didn't seem to be his strong point. But I had other excellent classes taught be renowned academics, especially Chem 104 by Neil Bartlett.

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Physics 4C, which was Optics, was much more interesting.

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My 4C was waves and oscillations in general, no classical optics. I didn't get all of the connections until a few years later working with analog computers (!). But 4C set me up to eventually understand things like refractive index, electrical impedance, and mechanical impedance are all the same. And I got my practical optics later in life.

My 4D was quantum phycics, culminating with Schrodinger's Equation. I didn't really get that at the time.

My 4E was statistical physics, which was my first experience with thermodynamics which made sense.

I was lucky to have most (4 A,B,C, and E) books in their final hardcover form and the other (4D) at least in paperback.

The labs sucked. Big time. Vacuum tube Heathkit equipment. But I did learn a few things by building my own transistor Heathkit 10 W stereo receiver and rebuilding a 956 cc Renault motor in my dorm room.

Back on topic, maybe we should consider it a plus if any HC candidate has taken Physics at Cal.

stu said:

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SFCityBear said:

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I had a good experience overall with Physics 4, which I took in 1960-61, I believe. I liked 4A which was Mechanics, always a strong suit of mine.

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In my time we were on quarters. 4A was still mechanics but emphasized particles rather than rigid bodies and included special relativity.

Quote:

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Physics 4B, Electricity and Magnetism, was a different matter.

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My 4B was also E&M but all theory, no circuits. It used the special relativity from 4A to explain magnetism, that was an eye-opener to me.

Quote:

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I had a lot of experience with electronics as a kid, growing up in the era transitioning from vacuum tubes to transistors. I was always taking radios apart to find out how they worked, and constructing circuits of all kinds.

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You're in good company with Richard Feynman.

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Professor Anderson went on to have a very successful career as a physicist.

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I had Nobel laureate Owen Chamberlain for 4C. Lower division teaching didn't seem to be his strong point. But I had other excellent classes taught be renowned academics, especially Chem 104 by Neil Bartlett.

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Physics 4C, which was Optics, was much more interesting.

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My 4C was waves and oscillations in general, no classical optics. I didn't get all of the connections until a few years later working with analog computers (!). But 4C set me up to eventually understand things like refractive index, electrical impedance, and mechanical impedance are all the same. And I got my practical optics later in life.

My 4D was quantum physics, culminating with Schrodinger's Equation. I didn't really get that at the time.

My 4E was statistical physics, which was my first experience with thermodynamics which made sense.

I was lucky to have most (4 A,B,C, and E) books in their final hardcover form and the other (4D) at least in paperback.

The labs sucked. Big time. Vacuum tube Heathkit equipment. But I did learn a few things by building my own transistor Heathkit 10 W stereo receiver and rebuilding a 956 cc Renault motor in my dorm room.

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Thanks a lot for the detailed reply.

My 4A was all mechanics, and no particles or relativity that I can remember. It was very similar to the lower division mechanics class I had when I later switched out of L&S to the College of Engineering. The fact that the Physics Department had introduced particles into your 4A class might have been part of the trend to introduce more advanced and theoretical subject matter earlier in both college and high school. I had about a year and half of calculus in high school (there was no other school in SF that taught calculus). I was able to pass Math 3A and 3B at Cal by taking their final exam, allowing me to take Math 4A as a freshman), whereas today, I think calculus is taught in most high schools.

My 4B, like yours, was all theory, no circuits. In my 4C, I think we did have some waves and oscillations, along with the optics, but the lab experiments were all optics, as I remember.

That is much too flattering a comparison with Richard Feynman, of whom I had not heard, but the similarity ends with repairing radios. He was a giant in physics. I will read more about him. Thanks.

My childhood inventions were goofy. I made a breadboard working model of a sewing machine in the 2nd grade, but years later, I realized it was just a piece of artwork, and wasn't a sewing machine at all. I was able to connect our phone line to my radio, making it an early version of the speaker phone. My mother was always worried about my experiments, so she called the phone company to ask if I might be doing some harm by fooling with the wires. They asked, "Where do you live? We need to come over right away to see what is going on." My mother hung up on them, and directed me to disconnect the wires immediately.

We used to have raccoons raid our garbage cans at night. I had a little Brownie camera with a flash, so I rigged up a switch on the can, which would trip the second the top was removed, and trigger the camera. I got a great photo of a raccoon's tail, and body all the way into the can.

I built a Knightkit Ocean Hopper short wave radio, and I still have scars from the soldering iron. 3 tubes and plug in coils. I was able to hear Radio Ceylon, half way around the world. I invented several radio antennas. As years went by, I did build lots of Heathkits, mostly short wave radios, transmitters and test equipment, and one of the first color TVs. That one took 40 hours. I was in LA then, working for Douglas Aircraft, and I bet some engineers at work $5 each that it would work when I first turned it on. I invited them over for the NFL Championship, Packers and NY Giants. The TV worked great until the end of the 1st quarter, when the screen went green, different shades of green. The Packers' uniforms went from green and yellow, to two shades of green. The engineers paid all the bets to me anyway. Heathkit later said one diode was undersized and sent me a new one. I built lots of Dynaco stereo equipment, and I still listen to my Dynaco Stereo 70 amp and two Dynaco preamps. The Stereo 70 is now bringing up to $1400 on EBay. Not bad for a $35 kit. I like vacuum tubes. At the very least, they can keep the hamshack warm on cold winter nights.

Owen Chamberlain. Wow. i had forgotten about him. For Atomic Physics 121 (I hope that is right) I had Luis Alvarez, another Nobel Laureate. That was where I encountered quantum physics, and I read Niels Bohr's book, or tried to. Alvarez was a good teacher, and the textbook was good. Alvarez actually went to Poly high school in SF, about two blocks from our apartment. Poly was mostly known for its shop classes. They even had a renowned electronics lab in the 1950s.

I remember the physics labs. Not so good. I took a semester off at Cal and got a job working at the standards lab at General Dynamics. My job was to calibrate instruments and write down the procedure used. They had Hewlett Packard gear, and Tektronix oscilloscopes. Far better than the Heathkit scopes in the Cal physics lab. I remember your story about rebuilding the Renault engine. Very impressive, getting that done in a dorm room.

SFCityBear said:

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I built lots of Dynaco stereo equipment, and I still listen to my Dynaco Stereo 70 amp and two Dynaco preamps. The Stereo 70 is now bringing up to $1400 on EBay. Not bad for a $35 kit. I like vacuum tubes. At the very least, they can keep the hamshack warm on cold winter nights.

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A friend of mine also built a Stereo 70. I guess quality always holds its value.

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I remember the physics labs. Not so good. I took a semester off at Cal and got a job working at the standards lab at General Dynamics. My job was to calibrate instruments and write down the procedure used. They had Hewlett Packard gear, and Tektronix oscilloscopes. Far better than the Heathkit scopes in the Cal physics lab.

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First thing I did when I got my community college job was taking inventory of everything in the stockroom. The next was replacing all the scopes with Tektronix 5110s. Simpler stuff like DC power supplies I made myself since HP cost too much and nothing else was reliable. Some of it is still in service after 50 years.

SFCityBear said:

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stu said:

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I believe there were significant differences between Cal in 1965 and Cal in 1970. A former colleague about 10 years older than I was a Chem E major and described similar to yours. However the generational difference in the students and the campus protests seemed to accelerate change. An example: my roommate had a math prof who was more than a little weird and one day threatened to flunk the entire class. The students marched en masse to the Dean and the result was they got a different prof. However in my time a full third of the undergrads flunked out anyway.

Was the Engineering Dean you mentioned named Lapsley (or something similar)? In my time that man terrified every engineering student. Things like that pushed me from Engineering to Physics - the material was pretty similar but I liked the Physics people a whole lot better.

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As to flunking out, I lost too many friends in my first and second years to that. Two stories:

I was in the Unit One dorms my first year, and there was a kid there, Larry, who always wore Bermuda shorts and thongs, and never went to class. He'd stay up late at night playing bridge, get up the next day around noon, read the newspaper, maybe drink some beer, and play bridge all afternoon. I saw him after he got the notice that he had flunked out. He said, "I can't understand it. They gave me four Fs and one D. I never went to a single class all semester. How could I have gotten this D?"

The second year, I was in a fraternity. After the first semester, one of the freshmen, Eddie, comes back with his report card. He proudly announced, "I'm up a half a grade point. Now I can coast for the next semester." In that second semester, he flunked out.

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Was there roughly the same time ('59-'62---early entrance to UCSF) and what you say is true, even though I was not in Engineering. Had to take Zoology, Chem 1A, 1B, 8, 9, Physics 2A, 2B, etc. in pre dental work. We had pre meds, pre pharms, pre nursing, etc all competing for too few slots. Grading was as you say. Lived in Bowles Hall for 2 years and many of my HS acquaintances were in Putnam and Deutsch (both brand new in fall of 59). Played against Morton and Schwaub in intramural hoops and went on to beat Phi Tau's for the IM championship.

Way too many frosh and sophs flunked out...Way too many. The juniors and seniors seemed to have the system figured out and were oft times playing bridge in the Bowles living room--always looking for a fourth. If the fourth was an underclassman he was often gone the next semester. It was dog eat dog. And the curve was probably somewhere between a C+ and B- overall. The other remembrance was that Cal was not a place if you wanted to graduate and get a job out of school unless you were in the pragmatic courses. It sure taught you discipline of thinking, but if you wanted to be a school teacher you had to take a 5th year elsewhere to get some certificate.

Still very fond memories after all these years.