During their first physics courses, most students struggle with mathematical concepts that are used but not fully understood, for example, the appearance of infinity in introductory physics exercises. In many cases, these concepts are critical to understanding the underlying physical phenomenon. Typically, most books do not place much emphasis on this type of analysis, which we believe is essential for the training of physics students. In this article, we will try to fill that gap by discussing three exercises that are frequently studied in introductory physics courses where objects of infinite length are involved. In this work, we find that it is possible to determine the length of an object that for practical purposes behaves like an object of infinite length.
The propagation of electromagnetic waves in a medium with electrical and magnetic anisotropy is a subject that is not usually handled in conventional optics and electromagnetism books. During this work, we try to give a pedagogical approach to the subject, using tools that are accessible to an average physics student. In this article, we obtain the Fresnel relation in a media with electromagnetic anisotropy, which corresponds to a quartic equation in the refraction index, assuming only that the principal axes of the electric and magnetic tensors coincide. Additionally, we find the geometric location related to the different situations the discriminant of the quartic equation provides. In order to illustrate our findings, we determine the refractive index together with the plane wave equations for certain values of the parameters that meet the established conditions. The target readers of the paper are students pursuing physics at the intermediate undergraduate level.
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