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Sound educational policy recommendations require valid estimates of causal effects, but observational studies in physics education research sometimes have loosely specified causal hypotheses. The connections between the observational data…
A variety of activities are commonly used in college physics courses including lab, tutorials, and studio curricula. Instructors must choose among using research-based activities, designing their own activities or modifying existing…
In recent years, a series of high-profile retractions and fraud cases have arisen in physics, sparking a conversation about research integrity and replicability. Here, we discuss how the practice of science is shaped by the social and…
Arrival times of requests to print in a student laboratory were analyzed. Inter-arrival times between subsequent requests follow a universal scaling law relating time intervals and the size of the request, indicating a scale invariant…
Experience of time is one of the primordial human experiences which is deeply tied to human consciousness. But despite this intimate relation of time with human conscious experience, time has proved to be very elusive. Particularly in…
The mindset literature is a longstanding area of psychological research focused on beliefs about intelligence, response to challenge, and goals for learning (Dweck, 2000). However, the mindset literature's applicability to the context of…
The attitude of a rigid body evolves on the three-dimensional special orthogonal group, and it is often estimated by measuring reference directions, such as gravity or magnetic field, using an onboard sensor. As a single direction…
One of the key skills of a researcher is noticing what's going on. Both in the experiment one's performing and in one's data: is there something interesting, reason to doubt one's data or suspect that one's theoretical description is…
Time plays a fundamental role in our ability to make sense of the physical laws in the world around us. The nature of time has puzzled people -- from the ancient Greeks to the present day -- resulting in a long running debate between…
This article aims at applying the approaches peculiar to analytic philosophy to the question about representation of the concept of time as a symbol which can reflect the bases of the modern natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.…
This article looks at philosophical aspects and questions that modern astrophysical research gives rise to. Other than cosmology, astrophysics particularly deals with understanding phenomena and processes operating at "intermediate" cosmic…
The large number of published articles in physics journals under the title "Comments on ..." and "Reply to ..." is indicative that the conceptual understanding of physical phenomena is very elusive and hard to grasp even to experts, but it…
This essay explores the relations between aesthetics and motivation, primarily in quantum physics, focusing on the notions of play, beauty, and the joy of insight. The motivating role of these notions is examined both historically among the…
Mathematical approaches to modeling the mind since the 1950s are reviewed. Difficulties faced by these approaches are related to the fundamental incompleteness of logic discovered by K. G\"odel. A recent mathematical advancement, dynamic…
{G}{ustav} Fechner's 1860 delineation of psychophysics, the measurement of sensation in relation to its stimulus, is widely considered to be the advent of modern psychological science. In psychophysics, a researcher parametrically varies…
The formal definition of limit is one mathematical idea that gives difficulties to most students. Therefore, it is necessary to provide engaging activity in order to construct the students' understanding about the definition. This study…
From classical mechanics to quantum field theory, the physical facts at one point in space are held to be independent of those at other points in space. I propose that we can usefully challenge this orthodoxy in order to explain otherwise…
Experiments may not reveal their full import at the time that they are performed. The scientists who perform them usually are testing a specific hypothesis and quite often have specific expectations limiting the possible inferences that can…
Understanding instructor attitudes and approaches to teaching quantum mechanics can be helpful in developing research-based learning tools. Here we discuss the findings from a survey in which 13 instructors reflected on issues related to…
For four decades it has been argued that we need to adopt a new conception of science called aim-oriented empiricism. This has far-reaching implications and repercussions for science, the philosophy of science, academic inquiry in general,…