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Discovered by Christopher Alexander, living structure is a physical phenomenon, through which the quality of the built environment or artifacts can be judged objectively. It bears two distinguished properties just like a tree: "far more…
It is known that superluminal transmission of information and energy contradicts Einstein's relativity. Here we announce an unusual TOE called 'nature theory' in which impossible things become possible. We present the scheme of an apparatus…
Many roboticists dream of presenting a robot with a task in the evening and returning the next morning to find the robot capable of solving the task. What is preventing us from achieving this? Sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) has…
The elements of reality coined by Einstein, Podoslky, and Rosen promoted a series of fundamental discussions involving the notion of quantum correlations and physical realism. The superposition principle applied in the double-slit…
Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws and how to…
Teaching physics in real-life contexts continues to be a challenge for teachers at different educational levels. In this article, three Context-Rich Problems are proposed to be implemented in the classroom for higher education, using the…
Existing imitation learning (IL) methods such as inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) usually have a double-loop training process, alternating between learning a reward function and a policy and tend to suffer long training time and high…
On a scientific meta-level, it is discussed how an overall understanding of the physical universe can be built on the basis of well-proven theories, observations, and recent experiments. In the light of almost a century of struggle to make…
Students who serve as Learning Assistants (LAs) and have the opportunity to teach the content they are learning, while also studying effective teaching pedagogy, have demonstrated achievement gains in advanced content courses and positive…
This paper aims to provide teachers with a tool to teach the essential features of special relativity, considering the students' difficulties highlighted by numerous studies. Our proposal presents special relativity as the solution to the…
Physically-realistic simulated environments are powerful platforms for enabling measurable, replicable and statistically-robust investigation of complex robotic systems. Such environments are epitomised by the RoboCup simulation leagues,…
If a cat, a cannonball, and an economics textbook are all dropped from the same height, they fall to the ground with exactly the same acceleration under the influence of gravity. This equality of gravitational accelerations of different…
In order to mitigate the sample complexity of real-world reinforcement learning, common practice is to first train a policy in a simulator where samples are cheap, and then deploy this policy in the real world, with the hope that it…
My discussions with John Bell about reality in quantum mechanics are recollected. I would like to introduce the reader to Bell's vision of reality which was for him a natural position for a scientist. Bell had a strong aversion against…
Crowdscience games may hold unique potentials as learning opportunities compared to games made for fun or education. They are part of an actual science problem solving process: By playing, players help scientists, and thereby interact with…
Virtual Reality (VR) becomes accessible to mimic a "real-like" world now. People who have a VR experience usually can be impressed by the immersive feeling, they might consider themselves are actually existed in the VR space.…
The enterprise of trying to explain different social and economic phenomena using concepts and ideas drawn from physics has a long history. Statistical mechanics, in particular, has been often seen as most likely to provide the means to…
Physical learning is an emerging paradigm in science and engineering whereby (meta)materials acquire desired macroscopic behaviors by exposure to examples. So far, it has been applied to static properties such as elastic moduli and…
Standard quantum theory was formulated with complex-valued Schrodinger equations, wave functions, operators, and Hilbert spaces. Previous work attempted to simulate quantum systems using only real numbers by exploiting an enlarged Hilbert…
Virtual Reality has become a significant element of education throughout the years. To understand the quality and advantages of these techniques, it is important to understand how they were developed and evaluated. Since COVID-19, the…