Mechanics and Relativity

The course on Mechanics and Relativity constitutes an extension of the Mechanics learned during the first year in the Physics I course. In the first place, new ways of formulating and solving problems in Classical Mechanics, alternative to the Newton¿s laws studied during the first year, will be presented: the Analytical Mechanics. Its fundamentals, advantages and disadvantages will be presented. Particular attention will be paid to the method based on the Lagrange¿s equations. Applications will be also presented to the study of the motion of the rigid body in space for which an essential tool, the Inertia Tensor, will be introduced. A generalized analysis of the small oscillations about the equilibrium position of systems with several degrees of freedom will be also addressed. The last part of the course will be devoted to one of the main areas of Modern Physics, developed during the first half of the twentieth century: the Relativistic Mechanics. The two postulates on which it is based will be presented, together with some of their main consequences such as a new approach to the concepts of space and time, or the well-known mass-energy equivalence.