Related papers: Aristotle, projectiles and guns
Difficulties presented by students on the concept of instantaneous velocity are well known. This is in part due to instantaneous speed being often defined in terms of the notion of mathematical limit, which may not be clear to many students…
In a planetary or satellite system, idealized as n small bodies in initially coplanar, concentric orbits around a large central body, obeying Newtonian point-particle mechanics, resonant perturbations will cause dynamical evolution of the…
This is an English translation of Euler's article "Principia motus fluidorum" in which the Euler equation (in two three dimensions) has been established for the first time in 1752. The actual publication has been delayed by nine years.…
We revisit Weyl's unified field theory, which arose in 1918, shortly after general relativity was discovered. As is well known, in order to extend the program of geometrization of physics started by Einstein to include the electromagnetic…
In our daily lives, we observe objects sinking, floating, or rising when immersed in a fluid. The Archimedes principle, which explains an object's behavior when immersed in a fluid, is important in fluid mechanics; however, it is a…
That the speed of light is always c=300,000km/s relative to any observer in nonaccelerating motion is one of the foundational concepts of physics. Experimentally this was supposed to have been first revealed by the 1887 Michelson-Morley…
In 1651 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli published within his Almagestum Novum, a massive 1500 page treatise on astronomy, a discussion of 126 arguments for and against the Copernican hypothesis (49 for, 77 against). A…
The hodograph, i.e. the path traced by a body in velocity space, was introduced by Hamilton in 1846 as an alternative for studying certain dynamical problems. The hodograph of the Kepler problem was then investigated and shown to be a…
The concepts of the Coriolis and the centrifugal force are essential in various scientific fields and they are standard components of introductory physics lectures. In this paper we explore how students understand and apply concepts of…
A relativistic theory is proposed to explain the anomalous accelerations of Pioneer 10/11, Galileo and Ulysses spacecrafts. The theory points out at the limitations of the weak field approximation and proposes a drift in the proper time of…
The present work is aimed to explain why we started to consider Vibrating Rays Theory (VRT) as a viable representation of nature, and to elaborate some of its consequences. In 1846 Faraday introduced the concept of vibrating rays, in which…
Pythagoras' theorem, the area of a triangle as one half the base times the height, and Heron's formula are amongst the most important and useful results of ancient Greek geometry. Here we look at all three in a new and improved light, using…
The only widely accepted explanation for the various arrows of time that everywhere and at all epochs point in the same direction is the `past hypothesis': the Universe had a very special low-entropy initial state. We present the first…
According to Aristotle, a philosopher in Ancient Greece, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". This observation was adopted to explain human perception by the Gestalt psychology school of thought in the twentieth century. Here,…
The three laws of Robotics first appeared together in Isaac Asimov's story 'Runaround' after being mentioned in some form or the other in previous works by Asimov. These three laws commonly known as the three laws of robotics are the…
The finite colliding bullets problem is the following simple problem: consider a gun, whose barrel remains in a fixed direction; let $(V_i)_{1\le i\le n}$ be an i.i.d.\ family of random variables with uniform distribution on $[0,1]$; shoot…
Throughout human history, people have used sight to learn about the world, but only in relatively recent times the science of light has been developed. Egyptians and Mesopotamians made the first known lenses out of quartz, giving birth to…
Galileo determined distances to stars based on the assumption that stars were suns, the apparent sizes of stars as seen through his telescope, and basic geometry. However, the apparent sizes that he measured were the result of diffraction…
The problem of axiomatization of physics formulated by Hilbert as early as 1900 and known as the Sixth Problem of Hilbert is nowadays even more topical than at the moment of its formulation. Axiomatic inconsistency of classic, quantum, and…
Aristotle was the first to declare himself in the class of natural philosophers ({\em physiologoi}) and he was the first physicist because he spelled out the first definitions of some basic physical concepts. Moreover, he was the first…