Related papers: Tunneling Through the Math Barrier: The Fledgling …
A primary goal of physics is to create mathematical models that allow both predictions and explanations of physical phenomena. We weave maths extensively into our physics instruction beginning in high school, and the level and complexity of…
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…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
The parts contributed by the author in recent discussions with several physicists and mathematicians are reviewed, as they have been occasioned by the 2006 book "The Trouble with Physics", of Lee Smolin. Some of the issues addressed are the…
The key difference between math as math and math in science is that in science we blend our physical knowledge with our knowledge of math. This blending changes the way we put meaning to math and even to the way we interpret mathematical…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
Learning to use math in physics involves combining (blending) our everyday experiences and the conceptual ideas of physics with symbolic mathematical representations. Graphs are one of the best ways to learn to build the blend. They are a…
Mathematics is an essential element of physics problem solving, but experts often fail to appreciate exactly how they use it. Math may be the language of science, but math-in-physics is a distinct dialect of that language. Physicists tend…
Throughout this book, we discuss some open problems in various branches of science, including mathematics, theoretical physics, astro-physics, geophysics etc. It is of our hope that some of the problems discussed in this book will find…
Physics has a bad press: it is seen by a majority of people as a boring discipline ever since their High School days. There is no glamour to it, just toil and pain, and for many who engaged in it, the end sight is often unemployment. Could…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…
The study guide (textbook) is part of a set of materials designed to support high-quality practical training in physics. It includes a collection of tasks for organizing both in-class and independent work. The guide serves as a foundation…
The aim of this textbook is to bridge in regard of quantum computation what proves to be a considerable threshold even to the usual science trained readership between the level of science popularization, and on the other hand, the presently…
An introduction to the physics and mathematics of the expanding universe, using no more than high-school level / undergraduate mathematics. Covered are the basics of scale factor expansion, the dynamics of the expanding universe, various…
Computation, the use of a computer to solve, simulate, or visualize a physical problem, has revolutionized how physics research is done. Computation is used widely to model systems, to simulate experiments, and to analyze data. Yet, in most…
A goal of PER is to understand how students use math in physics contexts. To investigate how students use math, we need to identify transitions between conceptual sense-making about physical systems and using mathematics to describe and to…
With an investigation into how students in a physics Master of science program make sense of their whole first year study experience in one of the years following a programme reform, we try to offer insights and advice to consider when…
This book is an attempt to help students transform all of the concepts of quantum mechanics into concrete computer representations, which can be constructed, evaluated, analyzed, and hopefully understood at a deeper level than what is…
As the frontiers of biology become increasingly interdisciplinary, the physics education community has engaged in ongoing efforts to make physics classes more relevant to life sciences majors. These efforts are complicated by the many…