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I present my views on the future of America's program in particle physics. I discuss a variety of experimental initiatives that do have the potential to make transformative impacts on our discipline and should be included in our program, as…
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been…
The ability to emotionally or intellectually understand another person's thoughts and feelings-empathy-can foster critical connections that facilitate learning and collaboration. We present a case study of physics faculty that examines…
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…
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…
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…
Wellness and mindfulness act as buzzwords these days, often seen as separate from physics. Yet we know they are important, and everything is related to physics! In this article, we will consider a few simple classroom activities that can…
We present the second part of a series of papers proposing a novel teaching sequence for Particle Physics in high school. The topic of the present work is Nuclear Physics. The goal of the sequence is to approach the subject in a way as to…
Single particle models are sufficient for many topics in introductory physics courses, but become misleading when applied to situations involving changes in internal energy. This paper merges two parallel attempts to reform the teaching of…
Social physics is an active and diverse field in which many scientists with formal training in physics study a broad class of complex social phenomena. Social physics investigates societal problems but most often does not count on the…
The large number of published articles in physics journals under the title "Comments on ..." and "Reply to ..." is indicative that the conceptual understanding of physical phenomena is very elusive and hard to grasp even to experts, but it…
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…
In a first course to classical mechanics elementary physical processes like elastic two-body collisions, the mass-spring model, or the gravitational two-body problem are discussed in detail. The continuation to many-body systems, however,…
From a department being resistant to change to students not buying into the new computational activities, the challenges that are faced with integrating computation into the physics undergraduate curriculum are varied. The Partnership for…
Quantum mechanics can seem like a departure from everyday experience of the physical world, but constructivist theories assert that learners build new ideas from their existing ones. To explore how students can navigate this tension, we…
Differentiable physics provides a new approach for modeling and understanding the physical systems by pairing the new technology of differentiable programming with classical numerical methods for physical simulation. We survey the rapidly…
Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws and how to…
With the advent of high-level programming languages capable of quickly rendering three-dimensional simulations, the inclusion of computers as a learning tool in the classroom has become more prevalent. Although work has begun to study the…
After a very brief review of twentieth century elementary particle physics, prospects for the next century are discussed. First and most important are technological limits of opportunities; next, the future experimental program, and finally…
Students in introductory calculus-based physics not only have difficulty understanding the fundamental physical concepts, they often have difficulty relating those concepts to the mathematics they have learned in math courses. This produces…