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Whoever has to learn or to teach thermodynamics is confronted with conceptual difficulties which are specific to this field of physics ([1],[2]). It seems that they can be eliminated by inserting relativity in the thermodynamic theory. The…
Separation of variables can be a powerful technique for solving many of the partial differential equations that arise in physics contexts. Upper-division physics students encounter this technique in multiple topical areas including…
Equations of State model relations between thermodynamic variables and are ubiquitous in scientific modelling, appearing in modern day applications ranging from Astrophysics to Climate Science. The three desired properties of a general…
One of the hurdles in teaching undergraduate thermodynamics is a plethora of complicated partial derivative identities. Students suffer from difficulties in deriving, justifying, or interpreting the identities, misconceptions about partial…
Thermodynamics is accepted as a universal truth, encompassing all macroscopic objects. Therefore, it is surprising to find that, within our current understanding, the photovoltaic effect has so far eluded the first and second laws of…
Thermodynamics could be seen as an expression of physics at a high epistemic level. As such, its potential as an inductive bias to help machine learning procedures attain accurate and credible predictions has been recently realized in many…
We discuss several ways of illustrating fundamental concepts in statistical and thermal physics by considering various models and algorithms. We emphasize the importance of replacing students' incomplete mental images by models that are…
The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, to make clear (and de-mystify) the basic concepts of classical thermodynamics, and thus to enable the integration of thermodynamics within systems modeling and control. Second, to demonstrate…
Statistical thermodynamics has a universal appeal that extends beyond molecular systems, and yet, as its tools are being transplanted to fields outside physics, the fundamental question, \textit{what is thermodynamics?}, has remained…
On the basis of information theory, a new formalism of classical non-relativistic mechanics of a mass point is proposed. The particle trajectories of a general dynamical system defined on an (1+n)-dimensional smooth manifold are treated…
The holographic principle states that the information about a volume of a system is encoded on the boundary surface of the volume. Holography appears in many branches of physics, such as optics, electromagnetism, many-body physics, quantum…
We present an educational proposal which aims to illustrate the elegant, refined and coherent physics contained in Thermodynamics, through a path which assigns to the microscopic description of the physical systems a constantly privileged…
Thermodynamics (in concert with its sister discipline, statistical physics) can be regarded as a data reduction scheme based on partitioning a total system into a subsystem and a bath that weakly interact with each other. The ubiquity and…
Almost all theories of physics have expressed physical laws by means of differential equations. One can ask: why differential equations? What is special about them? This article addresses these questions and is presented as an inquiry-based…
There is a common view in thermodynamics that the behavior of a macroscopic system can be described by only a few state variables. Although this is true for many cases, it is unclear whether it is meaningful to ask how many state variables…
Multivariate spatial data plays an important role in computational science and engineering simulations. The potential features and hidden relationships in multivariate data can assist scientists to gain an in-depth understanding of a…
The four equations of stellar structure are reformulated as two alternate pairs of variational principles. Different thermodynamic representations lead to the same hydromechanical equations, but the thermal equations require, not the…
We report on several specific student difficulties regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the context of heat engines within upper-division undergraduates thermal physics courses. Data come from ungraded written surveys, graded…
Though the mediums for visualization are limited, the potential dimensions of a dataset are not. In many areas of scientific study, understanding the correlations between those dimensions and their uncertainties is pivotal to mining useful…
Symbolic equations are one of the many representations used in physics. Understanding these representations is important for students because they are how students access knowledge in physics. In this paper I build off of the work by Redish…