Free online courseFundamentals of Physics II

Course Description

Build a solid, test-ready understanding of modern physics by connecting ideas that often feel fragmented in school. This course guides you from the behavior of electric charge to the way light and matter behave at the smallest scales, helping you develop the intuition and problem-solving habits that physics demands.

You’ll start with electrostatics and electric fields, learning how forces, fields, potential energy and voltage fit together. From there, you’ll deepen your understanding with tools like Gauss’s law and apply them to real physical situations, including conductors and insulators. As the course progresses, capacitors, resistance and circuit behavior become more than formulas: you’ll see how energy moves, why current flows, and what features of a circuit make charges able to do work.

Magnetism and induction follow naturally, clarifying how currents produce magnetic fields, how Ampere’s law is used, and why Faraday and Lenz’s laws sit at the heart of generators, transformers and electromagnetic devices. You’ll then unify these ideas through Maxwell’s equations, reaching the big picture of electromagnetic waves and what they imply about fields in free space.

To round out the physics story, the course transitions into ray (geometrical) optics and wave optics, giving you a framework for understanding image formation, light propagation and interference. Finally, you’ll step into quantum mechanics through key experiments and the shift away from Newtonian certainty. Concepts like probability density, measurement, energy states and the Schrödinger equation are developed carefully so that the mathematics supports the meaning, not the other way around.

Throughout, practice questions reinforce essential definitions and relationships, training you to translate a physical situation into a model and arrive at a clear conclusion. If you want a structured path through electromagnetism, optics and introductory quantum theory, this free course offers a rigorous, approachable way to level up your physics.