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We review in this paper the use of the theory of scale relativity and fractal space-time as a tool particularly well adapted to the possible development of a future genuine theoretical systems biology. We emphasize in particular the concept…
Analyses of interviews with secondary school students about their conceptions of light at the University of Potsdam indicate that numerous students have a deterministic view of light. With regard to these results the model of energy flow…
Energy has an ambiguous status in general relativity. For systems embedded in asymptotically flat space-times it is possible to construct an integral invariant that corresponds to total energy, however there is no local differential…
Physics Education Research (PER) applies a scientific approach to the question, "How do our students think about and learn physics?" PER allows us to explore such intellectually engaging questions as, "What does it mean to understand…
Computational physics is a key part of what it means to do physics in the twenty-first century. However, upper division computational physics remains a largely understudied area. We set out to understand the experiences of students in an…
Diversity has an important, multifaceted role in the success of education. I have used a corpus analysis of the first ten years of Physical Review Physics Education Research to investigate the diversity, broadly defined, of physics…
Increasingly, the physics community is attending to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, both in language and action. We are more publicly recognizing our individual responsibilities as physicists to address social injustice and…
We discuss the problem of partitioning a macroscopic system into a collection of independent subsystems. The partitioning of a system into replica-like subsystems is nowadays a subject of major interest in several field of theoretical and…
Both the basic educational contents for students and study programs for science teachers include several topics in physics and astronomy, from the simplest ones to others as advanced as nuclear fusion to explain stellar evolution and…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
Even if students can make the blend, interpret physics correctly in mathematical symbology and graphs, they still need to be able to apply that knowledge in productive and coherent ways. As instructors, we can show our solutions to complex…
We argue that most advances in science and technology during the past and the present centuries rely on modern physics concepts developed in the early $20$th century. The reliance is so profound that any improvement of literacy of science…
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…
Psychology has had difficulty accounting for the creative, context-sensitive manner in which concepts are used. We believe this stems from the view of concepts as identifiers rather than bridges between mind and world that participate in…
Students are taught several models of conductivity, both at the introductory and the advanced level. From early macroscopic models of current flow in circuits, through the discussion of microscopic particle descriptions of electrons flowing…
Footprints provide a way to estimate the relative impact of processes and products on the global climate. Including footprint analysis in a course on energy simultaneously provides students with an understanding of this tool and a…
We discuss the role of the internal forces and how their work changes the energy of a system. We illustrate the contribution of the internal work to the variation of the system's energy, using a pure mechanical example, a thermodynamical…
Physics Education Research frequently investigates what students studying physics do on small time scales (e.g. single courses, observations within single courses), or post-education time scales (e.g., what jobs do physics majors get?) but…
In this meta-analysis, we synthesize the results of 24 studies using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) and the Maryland Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX) to answer several questions: (1) How does physics…