Related papers: Learning Each Others' Ropes: Negotiating interdisc…
As a neuroscientist and a theoretical physicist, both working on time, we have decided to open a direct dialogue to examine if the apparent discrepancies regarding the nature of time can be composed.
Biochemists know that the law of mass action is not exact and not very useful because we cannot transfer it (with unchanged parameters) from one condition to another. I argue that exact equations require calibrated multiscale analysis to…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
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…
Physics has a bad press: it is seen by a majority of people as a boring discipline ever since their High School days. There is no glamour to it, just toil and pain, and for many who engaged in it, the end sight is often unemployment. Could…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
This paper investigates the interactions between context and professional development of physics instructors in a case study of two physics faculty. A phenomenological-case study approach was used to analyze two physics faculty at different…
The theme of the World Conference on Physics Education 2012 is "Context, Culture, and Representations." In this talk I present a brief outline of a theoretical framework that allows us to discuss these issues using a model based in…
The field of condensed matter physics had its genesis this century and it has had a remarkable evolution. A closer look at its growth reveals a hidden aim in the collective consciousness of the field - a part of the development this century…
Life occurs in ionic solutions, not pure water. The ionic mixtures of these solutions are very different from water and have dramatic effects on the cells and molecules of biological systems, yet theories and simulations cannot calculate…
The exchange of knowledge across different areas and disciplines plays a key role in the process of knowledge creation, and can stimulate innovation and the emergence of new fields. We develop here a quantitative framework to extract…
Science, being a social enterprise, is subject to fragmentation into groups that focus on specialized areas or topics. Often new advances occur through cross-fertilization of ideas between sub-fields that otherwise have little overlap as…
This article describes an undergraduate physics module at a university in England that places year 3 student physicists in secondary school classrooms for a semester. This is done as a way of introducing them to the occupation of secondary…
Physics curricula across the US fail to prepare students adequately to solve problems, especially novel problems. A new curriculum, Matter and Interactions (M&I), was designed to improve student learning by organizing concepts around…
Professional development workshops are commonly used to promote the adoption of research-based instructional strategies among physics and astronomy faculty. After learning about such strategies, faculty are often motivated to modify and…
The scope of this paper was to find out how the students in Computer Science perceive different teaching styles and how the teaching style impacts the learning desire and interest in the course. To find out, we designed and implemented an…
While students may find spline interpolation quite digestible, based on their familiarity with continuity of a function and its derivatives, some of its inherent value may be missed when students only see it applied to standard data…
What should these lectures be? The subject assigned to us is so broad that many books can be written about it. So, in planning these lectures I had several options. One would be to focus on a narrow subset of topics and to cover them in…
Educational technologies often misalign with instructors' pedagogical goals, forcing adaptations that compromise teaching efficacy. In this paper, we present a case study on the co-development of curriculum and technology in the context of…