Related papers: Putnam Physics Competition: a suggestion
The origins of Sociophysics are discussed from a personal testimony. I trace back its history to the late seventies. My twenty years of activities and research to establish and promote the field are reviewed. In particular the conflicting…
We describe a summer outreach program developed to cultivate interest in physics in particular and physical sciences more broadly among high school and early college students using small projects in the Python programming language. We…
Are we smarter now than Socrates was in his time? Society as a whole certainly enjoys a higher degree of education, but humans as a species probably don't get intrinsically smarter with time. Our knowledge base, however, continues to grow…
Physics education research (PER) aims to improve how students solve problems. But whose problems are we teaching students to solve? Physics has grown up as a child of war, and PER stems from the cognitive revolution in psychology, which…
The status in electroweak precision physics is reviewed. I present a brief summary of the latest data, global fit results, a few implications for new physics, and an outlook.
Forty years ago, Richard Feynman proposed harnessing quantum physics to build a more powerful kind of computer. Realizing Feynman's vision is one of the grand challenges facing 21st century science and technology. In this article, we'll…
As quantum theory celebrates its 100th birthday, spectacular successes are mixed with outstanding puzzles and promises of new technologies. This article reviews both the successes of quantum theory and the ongoing debate about its…
Accelerator and beam physics (ABP) is the science of the motion, generation, acceleration, manipulation, prediction, observation and use of charged particle beams. It focuses on fundamental long-term accelerator and beam physics research…
The key difference between math as math and math in science is that in science we blend our physical knowledge with our knowledge of math. This blending changes the way we put meaning to math and even to the way we interpret mathematical…
University extension activities play a fundamental role in bridging the gap between academia and society by fostering the socialization of scientific knowledge. This study reports and analyzes an outreach activity conducted in a public…
Our main goal is to develop plans to increase physics enrollment. Once again we thoroughly analyze the problem from the beginning and reach the conclusion that the most appropriate starting point in this direction should be to look into…
Though the truths of logic and pure mathematics are objective and independent of any contingent facts or laws of nature, our knowledge of these truths depends entirely on our knowledge of the laws of physics. Recent progress in the quantum…
As 2005, the International Year of Physics, comes to an end, two physicists working primarily in geophysical research reflect on how geophysics is not an applied physics. Although geophysics has certainly benefited from progress in physics…
Feynman gave in 1982 a keynote speech \textit{Simulating Physics with Computers} (Int. J. Theor. Phys. {\bf 21}, 467 (1982)) in which he talked ``...about the possibility...that the computer will do exactly the same as nature". The…
Over the past year and a half we have developed an innovative approach to the teaching of `Physical Science', a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. The new approach uses popular…
Resultants are getting increasingly important in modern theoretical physics: they appear whenever one deals with non-linear (polynomial) equations, with non-quadratic forms or with non-Gaussian integrals. Being a subject of more than…
We developed a two-day physics class that uses a nearby forest as a teaching location. Using low-cost material, students design and carry out physics projects outside of the usual controlled environment that is a classroom. In this way they…
The role of impossibilities in theories of Physics is mentioned and a recent result is recalled in which Quantum Mechanics is characterized by three information-theoretic impossibilities. The inconvenience of the asymmetries established by…
2011 marked the hundredth anniversary both of the famous Solvay conferences, and of the Geiger-Marsden experiment that launched the modern understanding of subatomic structure. I was asked to survey the status and prospects of particle…
The status of hadron physics at the end of the HADRON07 Conference is reviewed. The latest results presented at the conference, as well as those important developments in the field which were not represented, are included.