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When talking to secondary school students, first impressions are crucial. Accidentally say something that sounds boring and you'll lose them in seconds. A physical demonstration can be an eye-catching way to begin an activity or spark off a…
Euler stressed the importance of hypotheses, which he thought were the only means of arriving at a certain knowledge of the physical causes, essential to establish the laws of physics. This thought was communicated to Emilie du Chatelet in…
The CERN-Latin-American School of High-Energy Physics is intended to give young physicists an introduction to the theoretical aspects of recent advances in elementary particle physics. These proceedings contain lectures on quantum field…
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…
The rapidly increasing interest in the quantum properties of living matter stimulates a discussion of the fundamental properties of life as well as quantum mechanics. In this discussion often concepts are used that originate in philosophy…
We present recommendations to improve reproducibility and replicability in condensed matter physics. This area of physics has consistently produced both fundamental insights into the workings of matter and transformative inventions. Our…
In these three lectures, I review the physics of top quark. Each of the lectures is self-contained.
These are expanded notes for a short series of lectures, presented at the University of Luxembourg in 2017, giving an introduction to some of the ideas of supersymmetry and supergeometry. In particular, we start from some motivating facts…
These are lecture notes compiled for a short lecture series at the 2023 Condensed Matter Summer School at the University of Minnesota. They are designed to be conversational and fun, and not to take the place of review articles that do a…
The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the…
An introductory lectures on cosmology at ITEP Winter School for students specializing in particle physics are presented. Many important subjects are not covered because of lack of time and space but hopefully the lectures may serve as a…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
We have developed a set of laboratories and hands on activities to accompany a new two-semester interdisciplinary physics course that has been successfully developed and tested in two small test classes of students at the University of…
Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…
The first LHC results at 7-8 TeV, with the discovery of a candidate Higgs boson and the non observation of new particles or exotic phenomena, have made a big step towards completing the experimental confirmation of the Standard Model (SM)…
Soft condensed matter physics is the study of materials, such as fluids, liquid crystals, polymers, colloids, and emulsions, that are ``soft" to the touch. This article will review some properties, such as the dominance of entropy, that are…
These lecture notes are designed to provide a brief introduction into the phenomenology of active matter and to present some of the analytical tools used to rationalize the emergent behavior of active systems. Such systems are made of…
Physics education research has probed for the relevance of physics in students' everyday lives. Attitudinal and epistemological surveys have asked students if they think of or use physics in their daily lives. We have previously documented…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
Lecture notes prepared for the Les Houches school "Quantum Geometry: Mathematical Methods for Gravity, Gauge Theories and Non-Perturbative Physics" that took place during the summer 2024. We cover the techniques to perform the exact…