Related papers: Sliding rope paradox
The purpose of this letter is to show, on the one hand, how the so-called train paradox could be resolved directly without appealing to non-linear Lorentz transformations. The resolution is established in the most general case of…
With an investigation into how students in a physics Master of science program make sense of their whole first year study experience in one of the years following a programme reform, we try to offer insights and advice to consider when…
Analyzing paradoxes is interesting and instructive. Sometimes the analysis leads to non-trivial results. This methodological note sets out a paradox arising in the theory of propagation of electromagnetic waves in moving plasmas. The…
Putting several hard balls into a two-dimensional bowl can form a very basic two-dimensional model of hard-ball system. When the two-dimensional bowl has a parallel-rotation at a uniform speed around a center, when the number of balls is…
This lecture reviews the black hole information paradox and briefly appraises some proposed resolutions in view of developments in string theory. It goes on to give an elementary introduction to the holographic principle.
Zeno's paradoxes are explained as being the result of inappropriate combination of discrete and continuous mathematical systems. It is proposed that the source of this confusion lies in the course of development of the number system, which…
Simple physical models of a measuring rod and of a clock are used to demonstrate the contraction of objects and clock retardation in special relativity. It is argued that the models could help in promoting student understanding of special…
One of the most thrilling features of Physics is the possibility to establish analogies between apparently distant areas. Here we explain the parallel between a pile of grains interacting mechanically with each other, and a "pile" of…
This paper is concerned with the well known Jeffreys-Lindley paradox. In a Bayesian set up, the so-called paradox arises when a point null hypothesis is tested and an objective prior is sought for the alternative hypothesis. In particular,…
In this review we argue for the creation of a physics of moving systems -- a locomotion "robophysics" -- which we define as the pursuit of the discovery of principles of self generated motion. Robophysics can provide an important…
This work is basically about the general form of Newton's second law for variable mass problems. We develop a model for describing the motion of the one-dimensional oscillator with a variable mass within the framework of classroom physics.…
It is becoming common to hear teaching advice about spending more time on the "physics of the problem" so that students will get more physical insight and develop a stronger intuition that can be very helpful when thinking about physics…
The paper presents instructive interdisciplinary applications of constrained mechanics calculus in economics on a level appropriate for the undergraduate physics education. The aim of the paper is: 1. to meet the demand for illustrative…
We show how a potential that is well-defined everywhere on the positive half-line, but diverges to $-\infty$ as $x\rightarrow 0^+$, may still be able to dynamically confine a particle to the (positive) half-line. We shall call this effect…
We present a resolution of the celebrated "Surprise Exam Paradox". We argue that if the surprise exam story is analyzed using the exact same meaning of the notion of "surprise" as is dictated by the story itself, then no paradox arises.
A central question in dynamics is whether the topology of a system determines its geometry. This is known as rigidity. Under mild topological conditions rigidity holds for many classical cases, including: Kleinian groups, circle…
Many undergraduate students of engineering and the exact sciences have difficulty with their mathematics courses due to insufficient proficiency in what we in this paper have termed clear thinking. We believe that this lack of proficiency…
It is now known that the equations of motion for the contact point during peeling of an adhesive tape mounted on a roll introduced earlier are singular and do not support dynamical jumps across the two stable branches of the peel force…
Here we provide an overview of what is known, and what is not known, about an interesting dynamical system known as the Kepler-Heisenberg problem. The main idea is to pose a version of the classical Kepler problem of planetary motion, but…
The Legendre transform is an important tool in theoretical physics, playing a critical role in classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, and thermodynamics. Yet, in typical undergraduate or graduate courses, the power of motivation and…