Related papers: Britannia Rule the Waves
One of the main difficulties in a class on Sources of Energy and Social Policy is the wide variety of units used by different technologists (BTU's, Barrels of oil, Quads, kWh, etc). As every student eats, I think some of this confusion can…
We propose to address the problem of how to know students' knowledge in an entirely new approach called ?epistemography? which is, roughly, an attempt to describe the structure of this knowledge. We claim that what is to be known is made of…
Ten years ago humankind achieved the first direct observation of gravitational waves. I give some personal recollections of that first detection. I also present an incomplete summary of what we have learned since then, and some speculations…
We describe in detail an advanced project devised for outstanding High School (or undergraduate) students with appropriate abilities in physical reasoning (rather than with a good standard preparation), centered around the well-known…
For any kind of wave phenomenon one can find ways to derive the respective dispersion relation from experimental observations and measurements. This dispersion relation determines the structure of the wave equation and thus characterizes…
The controllability of a fully three-dimensional $N$-link swimmer is studied. After deriving the equations of motion in a low Reynolds number fluid by means of Resistive Force Theory, the controllability of the minimal $2$-link swimmer is…
This systematic mapping study consisted of tracking the scientific literature that addresses the issue of analogies as a didactic strategy in science teaching. An analogy can be understood as comparing an existing knowledge with a new…
This paper describes a series of activities in which students investigate and use the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic models of planetary motion. The activities guide students through using open source software to discover important…
Inspired by Mott's (1929) analysis of particle tracks in a cloud chamber, we consider a simple model for quantum cosmology which includes, in the total Hamiltonian, model detectors registering whether or not the system, at any stage in its…
We are surrounded by radiation that originated from the big bang. It has traveled to us from the farthest reaches of the Universe, carrying with it an unaltered record of the beginning of time and space. The radiation is in the form of…
These notes provide a quick introduction to the Coq system and show how it can be used to define logical concepts and functions and reason about them. It is designed as a tutorial, so that readers can quickly start their own experiments,…
First part of a didactic sequence of activities on some topics of Astronomy, related mainly with the day and night cycle and the seasons, including the construction of a simplified solar system model and its use as a resource to discuss…
Learning to follow instructions is of fundamental importance to autonomous agents for vision-and-language navigation (VLN). In this paper, we study how an agent can navigate long paths when learning from a corpus that consists of shorter…
The localization length for classical waves in two dimensional random media is calculated exactly, and is compared with the theoretical prediction from the previous analytic theory. Significant discrepancies are observed. It is also shown…
The concept of walking wave is introduced from classical relativistic positions. One- and three-dimensional walking waves considered with their wave equations and dispersion equations. It is shown that wave characteristics (de Broglie's and…
Although governments across Europe had realised the need to incentivise the development of practically viable longitude solutions as early as the late-sixteenth century, the English government was late to the party. An sense of urgency…
Traditional techniques used by navigators in the Marshall Islands include the use of wave patterns as influenced by reflection and refraction around islands. The dilep is one such pattern, apparently providing signals to guide a navigator…
Commonplace in oceanography is the collection of ocean drifter positions. Ocean drifters are devices that sit on the surface of the ocean and move with the flow, transmitting their position via GPS to stations on land. Using drifter data,…
Small-scale locomotion plays an important role in biology. Different modelling approaches have been proposed in the past. The simplest model is an infinite inextensible two-dimensional waving sheet, {originally introduced by Taylor}, which…
We study self propelled stokesian robots composed of assemblies of balls, in dimensions 2 and 3, and prove that they are able to control their position and orientation. This is a result of controllability, and its proof relies on applying…