Related papers: Interpreting Recoil For Undergraduate Students
We present a critical analysis of the classical approaches to energy subjects, based on the work-energy theorem and the conservation of mechanical energy proposed in the courses of the first years of tertiary education. We show how these…
Although the third law of thermodynamics was established almost a century ago, it is not yet universally considered to be a fundamental law of physics. A major problem is that there are many materials having residual entropy. Amorphous…
Newton's laws of motion pose an apparent problem, sometimes referred to as "the independence problem": the first law seems to be a simple consequence of the second law, raising the question of why it was included as a separate law. Numerous…
Throughout introductory physics, students create and interpret free body diagrams in which multiple forces act on an object, typically at a single location (the object's center of mass). The situation increases in difficulty when multiple…
We present results of our investigation into student understanding of the physical significance and utility of the Boltzmann factor in several simple models. We identify various justifications, both correct and incorrect, that students use…
During the process of teaching the concept of derivative, it is common and natural to refer to geometric interpretations, such as the use of the tangent line and the maximum and minimum points of a function, to illustrate the scope of the…
We report on several specific student difficulties regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the context of heat engines within upper-division undergraduates thermal physics courses. Data come from ungraded written surveys, graded…
In order to describe natural phenomena, science develops sophisticated models that use mathematical and formal languages which seem, and often are, very far from common experience. When a phenomenon is not accessible to our senses, its…
Too often, physics students are beset by feelings of failure and isolation rather than experiencing the creative joys of discovery that physics has to offer. This dissertation research was founded on the desire of a teacher to make physics…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…
Second part of a didactic sequence of activities on some topics of Astronomy, related mainly with the real shape of the Earth, the gravitational interactions between our planet and other celestial bodies, and the resulting movement of the…
Therotationofthecosmicobjectsisauniversalphenomenonanditsoriginisstillanopenquestion.Here a model for the origin of rotation is presented. After an investigation of the phase transition of a scalar field in de Sitter and G\"odel…
Classical linear wave superposition produces the appearance of interference. This observation can be interpreted in two equivalent ways: one can assume that interference is an illusion because input components remain unperturbed, or that…
The perspectives of introductory classical physics students can often negatively influence how those students later interpret quantum phenomena when taking an introductory course in modern physics. A detailed exploration of student…
This paper discusses an instructional strategy which explores eventual similarities and/or analogies between familiar problems and more sophisticated systems. In this context, the Atwood's machine problem is used to introduce students to…
Although osmosis is a familiar phenomenon, and of pivotal importance in natural systems, it is seldom explained how it might work on the molecular level (if treated at all in physics text books). The standard treatment of osmosis in…
The study of environmentally induced superselection and of the process of decoherence was originally motivated by the search for the emergence of classical behavior out of the quantum substrate, in the macroscopic limit. This limit, and…
The capability of making explainable inferences regarding physical processes has long been desired. One fundamental physical process is object motion. Inferring what causes the motion of a group of objects can even be a challenging task for…
Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…
Scientific discussions of the arrow of time often get quite confusing due to highly complex systems they deal with. Popular literature then often coveys messages that tend to get lost in translation. The purpose of this note is to demystify…