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A description of physical reality in which wholeness is the foundation is discussed along with the motivation for such an attempt. As a possible mathematical framework within which a physical theory based on wholeness may be expressed,…

Instructors and researchers think "thinking like a physicist" is important for students' professional development. However, precise definitions and observational markers remain elusive. We reinterpret popular beliefs inventories in physics…

The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…

In this essay, I argue that mathematics is a natural science---just like physics, chemistry, or biology---and that this can explain the alleged "unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. The main challenge for…

In order to describe natural phenomena, science develops sophisticated models that use mathematical and formal languages which seem, and often are, very far from common experience. When a phenomenon is not accessible to our senses, its…

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…

Some contributions of physics towards the understanding of consciousness are described. As recent relevant models, associative memory neural networks are mentioned. It is shown that consciousness and quantum physics share some properties.…

A simple procedure for restoring the constants in physical equations is introduced by a consistent consideration of the correspondence between the symbols representing physical quantities and pairs formed by numerical values and unit…

All sciences need and many arts apply mathematics whereas mathematics seems to be independent of all of them, but only based upon logic. This conservative concept, however, needs to be revised because, contrary to Platonic idealism…

Scientific communication inside and outside the classroom is the main means for providing an adequate understanding of how science and technological innovation relate to society. In order to achieve this goal, it is important to explore new…

Some aspects of the physical nature of language are discussed. In particular, physical models of language must exist that are efficiently implementable. The existence requirement is essential because without physical models no communication…

This paper reviews connections between physics and computation, and explores their implications. The main topics are computational "hardness" of physical systems, computational status of fundamental theories, quantum computation, and the…

Learning to create, use, and evaluate models is a central element of becoming a scientist. In physics, we often begin an analysis of a complex system with highly simplified or toy models. In introductory physics classes, we tend to use them…

The mathematical representation of the physical objects determines which mathematical branch will be applied during the physical analysis in the systems studied. The difference among non-quantum physics, like classic or relativistic…

Dirac sought an interpretation of mathematical formalism in terms of physical entities and Einstein insisted that physics should describe "the real states of the real systems". While Bell inequalities put into question the reality of…

In contemporary theoretical physics, the powerful notion of symmetry stands for a web of intricate meanings among which I identify four clusters associated with the notion of transformation, comprehension, invariance and projection. While…

Despite nation efforts to promote diversity and inclusion, women and gender minorities remain underrepresented in physics. One common approach to studying gender in physics contexts treats gender as a categorical identity variable (e.g.…

Writing is an integral part of the process of science. In the undergraduate physics curriculum, the most common place that students engage with scientific writing is in lab classes, typically through lab notebooks, reports, and proposals.…

The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…

It has been reported that students often leave the introductory physics classroom believing that physics is less connected to the real world than when they entered. In this paper we aim to complicate that narrative by considering students'…