material left out

Since my last post I thought of many things I would like to have included but didn't. I guess the biggest is that I got two questions near the end that were effectively about Coriolis force. I did no non-inertial forces and/or accelerated reference frames. And this would have been fun to bring up in the context of Galileo, because there is a non-trivial Coriolis effect on his (apocryphal) experiment at the leaning tower of Pisa. It also is a nice use of cross products and pseudo-vectors.

last class

I gave my last class today; still have to prepare a final. It has been a fun semester, and the students have performed well with a set of extremely difficult problems in lectures and recitations and problem sets, including ill-posed problems, approximate problems, and numerical problems. I ran out of time at the end, as I always do. Many subjects were not covered. Perhaps my biggest regret is not making it to the analysis of non-circular orbits using the effective one-dimensional radial potential. This analysis takes a long time to set up and then solve, but it is so damned beautiful.