Note: this page is for 2000 Fall, and is now
out of date.
Click here for Dr. Ringwald's current P Sci 21 page

Preparation: This course will require the use of intermediate algebra and basic geometry. We will also use scientific notation, unit conversions, and proportions.

Course meeting times and location:

Required Course Texts:

Required Course Equipment: (1) Clear plastic ruler; (2) Flashlight (preferably with a red filter, for night vision); (3) Scientific calculator (that has scientific notation, and can calculate logarithmic, exponential, and other functions)

Course Web page: http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/psci2100f.html

Course grades will be based on these weights:

2 Midterm Exams (drop lowest 1):	20%
Laboratory:	20%
Homework:	10%
1000-word paper, due at the beginning of the last session of class:	20%
Final Exam, which will be comprehensive (covering all material in the entire course):	30%

Please note:

• Lab Activity Section: All P Sci 21 students must sign up for an activity section. A flashlight will be required for map reading at observing sessions; flashlights with red filters are recommended, being superior for night vision. A scientific calculator and a clear plastic ruler will be required as well. In addition to the activities in the lab manual, students will become familiar with the constellations, asterisms, and bright stars. We will also learn how to use a telescope to view the Moon, the planets, star clusters, gaseous nebulae, and galaxies. I expect that, by the end of the course, you will be able to locate even faint, hard-to-find objects, using the telescopes while working from your maps.

  If you miss a lab, then you will receive a zero for that lab. There will be no make-up labs without an excused absence for a compelling reason (e.g. job interview, illness documented by a doctor's note). If you have three or more unexcused absences from the lab then will receive an F in the course. Astronomy labs will start on Monday, September 11.

• These lab sessions necessarily take place after dark, since the object of study is the night sky. If safety becomes a concern, the Campus Police provide an escort program. Radio-equipped, uniformed, trained escort officers will accompany persons to their destinations on campus during hours of darkness. Call 278-2132, or pick up an emergency phone to request an escort officer. Be sure to check their badges, before going anywhere with them. The Campus Police also provide car battery assistance and other services, and can be reached in an emergency by calling 911.

  
  

• Attendance:
  All students are expected to attend all class sessions. All students are also expected to arrive for class on time, and to attend to the end of all class sessions. Doing otherwise is disruptive, in large classes like these. So is reading newspapers: students reading newspapers during class will be asked to leave. If you must miss a lecture, for a compelling reason (e.g. job interview or illness documented by a doctor's note), then get the notes from another student.

• This syllabus and schedule are subject to change in the event of extenuating circumstances. If you are absent from class, it is your responsibility to check on announcements made while you were absent.

• Keep up with the reading assignments, throughout the semester. Class time is valuable: it is much better spent in informed, active discussion among all of us than in just me talking. It always amazes me: the students who get "A"s are almost always the ones who keep up with the reading. The ones who don't, almost always are the ones who don't.

• Asking questions is also part of active discussion. Please don't be shy about asking questions in class, or during office hours. Remember that the only "dumb" question is the one you didn't ask, that fouled you up later because you didn't ask it! This is especially so in this class: there are some mighty strange things out there in the Universe...

• All work that students turn in as their own must really be their own. Proper credit and attribution of one's sources is so important in science, as well as in other fields. I will allow students to collaborate with each other on homework and lab assignments, provided everyone lists their "co-investigators" on their papers. Scientists often do this, and the ability to collaborate well and work as part of a team is a good skill to have, in science and in most other professions.

  However, if you do collaborate, it must be genuine collaboration: not one person doing all the work, and the others blindly copying. That's cheating! Cheating and plagiarism are very serious matters, and the worst possible things for science. What's the point of doing science, creating new knowledge about the Universe, if it isn't honest?

  Therefore, while you may do the work together, write up the results separately, in your own words. A dead giveaway is when I get two papers that are exactly the same. Do people who do this think I don't notice it? I certainly don't like it!

  I like even less when students take papers from the Internet, and turn them in as their own work. This is now very easy for professors to detect, with www.plagiarism.org. Modifying someone else's paper slightly, or changing the words around, or stringing someone else's paragraphs together, even if they're cited, is no better: these dubious practices still don't make it your paper. For information on the University's policy regarding cheating and plagiarism, refer to the Schedule of Courses (Legal Notices on Cheating and Plagiarism) or the University Catalog (Policies and Regulations).

• All students are required to turn off all beepers, pagers, and portable phones while class lectures are in session, because they are so disruptive.

• I have often used e-mail to communicate with students, and please feel free to send e-mail to me. However, all assignments, including lab assignments, paper titles and summaries, and papers, must be handed in as paper copies at the beginning of the class periods in which they are due.

  Hang onto all copies of all work you have done in all your classes, ever. They'll be a big help if, one day, you find yourself teaching a class like this. Hang on to you textbooks, too: even the real stinkers can serve as bad examples.

• I also plan to use the World Wide Web in this course. I will require you to know how to use an Internet browser and how to use e-mail. Most students will already know this, but if you don't, don't be embarrassed. Please let me know: I'd be glad to give you private lessons during my office hours (TTh 9:30-11, WF 1-3, and by appointment). Although it would be a big advantage for your schoolwork, you need not own a computer, since you may use the computers at many labs around campus.

  If Web access is still a problem for you, please come to office hours or make an appointment, and I'll let you use my machine. I won't therefore accept excuses such as "I couldn't use the Internet" or "My browser wasn't Java enabled." (This last one was sprung on me last year. The shame is that, if you can run Netscape, you can run Java: just pull down the menu and select "Enable Java.")

• The Department of Physics cooperates with the Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) to make reasonable accomodations for qualified students with physical, perceptual, or learning disabilities (cf. Americans with Disabilities Act and Section of 504, Rehabilitation Act). Present your written accomodation request to me as soon as possible.

• Sorry, but for classes this size, NO late assignments can be accepted, including homework, lab assignments, paper summaries, papers, or any other assignments.

• Exams: There will be three midterm exams during the semester and a comprehensive final exam. The lowest midterm grade will be dropped. The material for these exams will come from the lectures and assigned reading. The exams will include multiple choice questions and identification of constellations and stars from maps. All of the examinations will be closed book and as such you may not use any notes or books during the exam. Calculators may be used for the exams.

  Sorry, but I do not give make-ups for midterm exams. These classes are far too large for that, and even with smaller classes, I can never be sure that a makeup was really fair, since it must be different from the regular exam. If you should have to miss a midterm exam for a compelling reason (e.g. job interview or illness documented by a doctor's note), I will void the part of the course grade that midterm would have counted and count the rest of the grade as 100%..

  Once a student leaves the classroom after taking an exam, the student may not re-enter the classroom as long as that exam is still taking place. The student's leaving the exam will be taken to signify that the student has finished that exam.

• All grading will be done "on a curve", meaning that how you do relative to everyone else in the class is more important to how your grade is determined than strict percentages, e.g. 90 - 100 is an A, etc. In this class, maybe 80 - 100 will be an A. We won't know until we've taken the exams and carefully thought about the results.

  I have to do this because we will be covering a lot of material at the forefronts of knowledge. This isn't like high school, where everything has been taught for years to hundreds of other people, and so how to teach it has been thoroughly tested by the time it gets to you. We're now doing the real thing: we're not on the sidelines watching science anymore, this is science, and everything is constantly changing and so must be custom-made.

  College is a lot like juggling. There are many, many different things to do: work, parties, relationships, living away from home, road trips, clubs, sports, etc. The one ball you must not drop, though, is academics: without that, nothing else matters.

  If you all do well in this class, well enough for all of you to earn "A"s, I'll award you all "A"s. The Dean will think it's weird, but I'll say you're a talented bunch, and if I need to, I'll personally argue on your behalf.

  On the other hand, "F"s will be awarded for class non-attendance and flagrant neglect of class work - so don't do that, all right? I really hate awarding poor grades. I vastly prefer to see my students do well: it's a far better use of my own (not plentiful) time.

  Still, if for some reason you get into trouble serious enough to want to drop the course, such as getting so far behind you can't catch up, don't just stop coming to class and think that will be the end of it. See "Adding and Dropping Course" on page 61 of the CSUF 2000-2001 General Catalog, as well as the current Schedule of Courses, for how to do this. Dropping a class is a serious matter. Try to avoid such a terrible waste of time and tuition money by keeping on top of things - for example, by always keeping up with your reading assignments. Again, I want to see you, my students, do well!

• Research Papers: Writing is a key skill for everyone, especially for scientists. No scientific investigation is complete until it becomes known to the world, and scientists do this by writing papers and publishing them. There have been too many important scientific discoveries that were ignored for years because the scientists did a poor job of writing up the results, in a way that people could understand.

  I will therefore assign a 1000-word paper, due on the last day of instruction for this class. Since I take this so seriously, I will personally read and grade every one, so make them good! Having something to say in your paper is important. How you write it is also important: good content is so much easier to understand if it's written in a way that's easy to understand. For hints on writing, see The Elements of Style, by W. B. Strunk and E. B. White. This little book should be available in the campus bookstore for only about $3.95, although there is also now an online version. Read it from cover to cover twice a year, and understand it clearly, for life!

  These papers may be on any topic in contemporary or historical astronomy or space exploration. Tentative paper titles (you're allowed to change your mind if you later discover something better: this is something I like particularly about science), with a typed or printed short summary (between 100 and 250 words) of your paper topic, will be due at the beginning of class on the class session immediately before Thanksgiving break.

  Papers must be typed or better, computer printed, on standard 8.5-inch x 11-inch paper with standard, one-inch margins, in a readable 12-point serif font such as Times or Computer Modern Roman (not Helvetica, Monaco, or Geneva, which are sans serif and hard to read in large doses).

  These papers must provide a list of references: not doing so can turn an "A" paper into a "B" paper. Use at least five references, with no more than two of the five from the web.

  One thousand words isn't much. I want these papers to be well-thought-out, polished, beautiful little gems that have something to say, not big loads of ore for which it isn't even clear what they're about. It will help to focus on a specific topic. A 1000-word paper titled "Stars" can't be very good; stars are complex. A 1000-word paper on star formation would be a little better, but still, star formation is a vast topic in itself. More like it would be a 1000-word paper on Herbig-Haro objects, or on submillimeter-wave observations of Class 0 sources (the youngest protostars). As another example, a 1000-word paper on a topic as broad as relativity would not do an adequate job, unless it were something really special. A 1000-word paper on time would be only slightly better. A 1000-word paper on why time goes forward (a favorite subject of Steven Hawking's) would be much better. As yet another example, a 1000-word paper on the Sun would not do our magnificent star justice. A 1000-word paper on the solar neutrino problem probably wouldn't work, either. What might work would be a 1000-word paper on the recent discovery of neutrino mass with the Super-Kamiokande detector, and its implications for the solar neutrino problem, or on just one of the many amazing observational results from the SOHO spacecraft, such as the discoveries of the mechanism for coronal heating, flare-induced Sun-quakes, or rivers or tornadoes on the Sun: no kidding!

  For ideas, see the text, including chapters we haven't yet read, as well as current and back issues of popular magazines such as Sky & Telescope, Astronomy, Physics Today, and Scientific American. These sources will also be useful for references for further reading. Articles in these magazines are also what your papers should be like, although your page limit is shorter. Feel free to use the Web for research, too, but be careful of what you use, there's really a great deal of rubbish on the Web. As always, when using the Web for research, be sure to attribute your sources, by listing their Web addresses (also known as URLs)!