Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Welcome to PHY212! This course is the second of three calculus-based physics courses offered at PCC, and covers a wide range of topics including oscillations and waves, thermodynamics, optics, and fluids. It's an exciting class with many practical applications to the real world, including the optics of corrective lenses for vision, the physics of sound and musical instruments, buoyancy and floatation, refrigeration, and much more. Students will end the course by building a working heat engine in lab to simulate the thermodynamics at work in a heat pump or refrigerator.

This class will take place entirely in-person at the Sylvania campus. Attendance in lecture and lab is required, as students will learn best by working with other students in a collaborative setting. Lectures will give students opportunities to practice using physics to solve problems, and labs will offer a hands-on environment for students to conduct experiments and take measurements to verify physical laws and theories.

The textbook for this course is Physics for Scientists and Engineers by Randall Knight. Any edition of the textbook can be used for this class, students looking to save money on textbook costs should seek out used or older editions. Other undergraduate, calculus-based physics textbooks may also work for this class, if students have access to another physics textbook and would like to see if it's compatible, please email the instructor.