Related papers: Materials Science in Ancient Rome
The physics of glasses can be studied from many viewpoints, from material scientists interested in the development of new materials to statistical physicists inventing new theoretical tools to deal with disordered systems. In these lectures…
We give a simple rigourous treatment of the classical results of the abelian sandpile model. Although we treat results which are well-known in the physics literature, in many cases we did not find complete proofs in the literature. The…
Over the past decades, kinetic description of granular materials has received a lot of attention in mathematical community and applied fields such as physics and engineering. This article aims to review recent mathematical results in…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
Increased demands in the field of scientific computation require that algorithms be more efficiently implemented. Maintaining correctness in addition to efficiency is a challenge that software engineers in the field have to face. In this…
Among the first devices used to measure the time we find the sundials and the water-clocks, as told by Vitruvius in his book on the Architecture. The sundials work because of the shadows cast by a rod or pole, the gnomon, on their…
Predicting and characterizing the crystal structure of materials is a key problem in materials research and development. It is typically addressed with highly accurate quantum mechanical computations on a small set of candidate structures,…
This article proposes a reading of Book I of Euclid's Elements with an emphasis of the experiences of infinity supplied by it, as a preparatory study for a research on the embodied cognition of infinity and its material anchors. -- Cet…
A general overview of neutrino physics is given. The history of the neutrino starting from Pauli and Fermi is briefly presented. Two-component neutrinos, the phenomenological V-A theory and the standard model are discussed. The problem of…
The structure, formation and evolution of the Universe were some of the main topics in the scientific debates during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. They involved novel ideas on the cosmos, which concerned aspects that were not…
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…
In materials science and engineering, one is typically searching for materials that exhibit exceptional performance for a certain function, and the number of these materials is extremely small. Thus, statistically speaking, we are…
This article describes epistemological distinctions between science and history. Science investigates models of natural law using repeatable experiments as the ultimate arbiter. In contrast, history investigates past events by considering…
Following the results and the general methodological framework of a preceeding paper (Models and Metaphors, part I, henceforth: MM), we develop some results on the epistemological state of natural laws and ask for explicit possibilities of…
The properties of money commonly referenced in the economics literature were originally identified by Jevons (1876) and Menger (1892) in the late 1800s and were intended to describe physical currencies, such as commodity money, metallic…
The article is an historical overview of some of the major contributions from different areas of Science with which, for centuries, it has been built up a scientific, sound and consistent vision of the atom. Some experiments that led us to…
Classical physics has enabled the acquisition of significant knowledge of the physical properties of nature on a standard macroscopic scale. These achievements were driven by use of the causal ontological approach (proposed originally by…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
This paper describes a series of activities in which students investigate and use the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic models of planetary motion. The activities guide students through using open source software to discover important…
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…