Related papers: Teaching Einsteinian Physics at Schools: Part 1, M…
This work analyzes the difficulties in learning and teaching Einstein's theory of special relativity. An extensive bibliographic review has been performed, considering articles published in the most relevant journals on science education,…
Quantum physics is considered as one of the most remarkable discoveries of contemporary physics grown during previous century and gradually manifested to the scientific world such as inventions of laser, the transistor, the electron…
A century after its formulation by Einstein, it is time to incorporate special relativity early in the physics curriculum. The approach advocated here employs a simple algebraic extension of vector formalism that generates Minkowski…
This article, written to appear as a chapter in "The Springer Handbook of Spacetime", is a review of the initial value problem for Einstein's gravitational field theory in general relativity. Designed to be accessible to graduate students…
We outline here the design, execution, and educational outcomes of an intervention inspired by Einstein's elevator thought experiment, intended to introduce secondary school students to the principle of equivalence, which is at the basis of…
While quantum mechanics (QM) is covered at length in introductory physics textbooks, the concept of quantum entanglement is typically not covered at all, despite its importance in the rapidly growing area of quantum information science and…
Einstein's general theory of relativity is the standard theory of gravity, especially where the needs of astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology and fundamental physics are concerned. As such, this theory is used for many practical purposes…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
This paper examines the initial beliefs held by elementary educators (n=11) and their students about teaching and learning quantum concepts at the elementary level. All teachers were participants in a grant-funded project focused on…
Introducing Modern Physics represents an increasingly urgent need, towards which physics education concentrates many efforts. In order to contribute to this attempt, at the Department of Mathematics and Physics of Roma Tre University in…
A goal of physics is to understand the greatest possible breadth of natural phenomena in terms of the most economical set of basic concepts. However, as the understanding of physics has developed historically, its pedagogy and language have…
I give a compact, pedagogical review of our present understanding of the universe as based on general relativity. This includes the uniform models, with special reference to the cosmological 'constant'; and the equations for…
Aspects of quantum physics are no longer confined to the upper years of a physics degree. Concepts like superposition or entanglement that were once reserved for second- or third-year undergraduate courses now deserve attention earlier in a…
Einstein's general theory of relativity is the standard theory of gravity, especially where the needs of astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology and fundamental physics are concerned. As such, this theory is used for many practical purposes…
This contribution shows that the main topics of Relativity can be discussed at an elementary level and in a considerable extent - including the formal results of "Time Dilation" and "Lorentz Contraction" - by a minor modification of the…
We present a way of teaching Einstein's special relativity. It starts with Galileo's relativity, the learners know from previous lectures. The lecture underlines that we can have three transformation equations for the space-time coordinates…
While quantum field theory could more aptly be called the "quantum field framework" $-$ as it encompasses a vast variety of varying concepts and theories $-$ in comparison, relativity, both special and general, is more commonly portrayed as…
This paper presents some ideas which might assist teachers incorporating special relativity into an introductory physics curriculum. One can define the proper-time/velocity pair, as well as the coordinate-time/velocity pair, of a traveler…
We present two methods for describing, from a pedagogical point of view, the solutions of Einstein's equations applied to a homogeneous and isotropic universe. In the first method, we define an effective gravitational potential of the…
A "quantum-first" approach to gravity is described, where rather than quantizing general relativity, one seeks to formulate the physics of gravity within a quantum-mechanical framework with suitably general postulates. Important guides are…