Related papers: Interactional processes for stabilizing conceptual…
Learning advanced physics, in general, is challenging not only due to the increased mathematical sophistication but also because one must continue to build on all of the prior knowledge acquired at the introductory and intermediate levels.…
We develop a stability theory for contractive local IFSs on compact metric spaces. Unlike the classical global setting, local systems may exhibit a richer symbolic and geometric structure, including code spaces that are not of finite type…
Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical…
Belief systems are rarely globally consistent, yet effective reasoning often persists locally. We propose a novel graph-theoretic framework that cleanly separates credibility--external, a priori trust in sources--from confidence--an…
Proficiency with calculating, reporting, and understanding measurement uncertainty is a nationally recognized learning outcome for undergraduate physics lab courses. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) is a research-based assessment…
Curiosity is the strong desire to learn or know more about something or someone. Since learning is often a social endeavor, social dynamics in collaborative learning may inevitably influence curiosity. There is a scarcity of research,…
Integrating computation into physics teaching is a curricular move that, at present, has been predominately studied for its cognitive impacts. However, if this modality of instruction shifts how students engage with physics, we argue there…
Persistent homology analysis provides means to capture the connectivity structure of data sets in various dimensions. On the mathematical level, by defining a metric between the objects that persistence attaches to data sets, we can…
Recent experimental results point to the existence of coherent quantum phenomena in systems made of a large number of particles, despite the fact that for many-body systems the presence of decoherence is hardly negligible and emerging…
Biological infants are naturally curious and try to comprehend their physical surroundings by interacting, in myriad multisensory ways, with different objects - primarily macroscopic solid objects - around them. Through their various…
Dynamical heterogeneities in a colloidal fluid close to gelation are studied by means of computer simulations. A clear distinction between some fast particles and the rest, slow ones, is observed, yielding a picture of the gel composed by…
This paper re-centres the discussion of student learning in physics to focus on context. In order to do so, a theoretically-motivated understanding of context is developed. Given a well-defined notion of context, data from a novel…
We study spatial coherence near a classical environment by loading a Bose-Einstein condensate into a magnetic lattice potential and observing diffraction. Even very close to a surface (5$\,\mu$m), and even when the surface is at room…
Complex systems with global interactions tend to be stable if interactions between components are sufficiently homogeneous. In biological systems, which often have small copy numbers and interactions mediated by diffusing agents, noise and…
The elapsed-time model describes the behavior of interconnected neurons through the time since their last spike. It is an age-structured non-linear equation in which age corresponds to the elapsed time since the last discharge, and models…
A theory of structure is formulated for systems of many structureless classical particles with stable local interactions in Euclidean space. Such systems are shown to have their structure in thermodynamic equilibrium determined exactly by a…
Synchronization of chaos arises between coupled dynamical systems and is very well understood as a temporal phenomena which leads the coupled systems to converge or develop a dependence with time. In this work, we provide a complementary…
This contribution shortly outlines and reviews a theoretical and computational approach for a theory of change concerning systems where it is not possible to apply the laws of motion ab initio. The concept of meta-structure relates to the…
Research on nontraditional laboratory (lab) activities in physics shows that students often expect to verify predetermined results, as takes place in traditional activities. This understanding of what is taking place, or epistemic framing,…
Chimera states have been a vibrant subject of research in the recent past, but the analytical treatment of transitions from chimeras to coherent states remains a challenge. Here we analytically derive the necessary conditions for this…