Related papers: Science of a coffee cup: a physicist walks into a …

Following a brief review on the history and the current development of fiber optics, the significance of teaching fiber optics for science and non-science major college students is addressed. Several experimental demonstrations designed to…

Astroparticle physics and cosmology allow us to scan the universe through multiple messengers. It is the combination of these probes that improves our understanding of the universe, both in its composition and its dynamics. Unlike other…

Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…

We developed a two-day physics class that uses a nearby forest as a teaching location. Using low-cost material, students design and carry out physics projects outside of the usual controlled environment that is a classroom. In this way they…

Implicit communication plays such a crucial role during social exchanges that it must be considered for a good experience in human-robot interaction. This work addresses implicit communication associated with the detection of physical…

Electricity in the atmosphere provides an ideal topic for educational outreach in environmental science. To support this objective, a simple instrument to measure real atmospheric electrical parameters has been developed and its performance…

Defining interdisciplinary physics today requires first a reformulation of what is physics today, which in turn calls for clarifying what makes a physicist. This assessment results from my forty year journey arguing and fighting to build…

We present a study of the dynamics of a cup of coffee while walking with it in terms of a lumped model. The model considered is a planar (nonlinear) pendulum with parametric and direct excitation. The position of the pivot is changed with…

This teaching article describes a simple and low-cost methodology for studying electrical transport and constructing basic sensor devices using everyday stationery items, including pencils, paper, and a handheld multimeter. The approach is…

Laboratory experiments provide a valuable complement to explore the fundamental physics of space plasmas without the limitations inherent to spacecraft measurements. Specifically, experiments overcome the restriction that spacecraft…

This article is an invitation. It is, first, an invitation to consider as a subject worthy of attention the wide range of situations where small discrete elements, either bubbles, droplets or solid particles, are embedded in turbulent…

I briefly review a recent series of papers putting forward a coarse-grained theoretical approach to the physics of supercooled liquids approaching their glass transition. After a suitable coarse-graining, the dynamics of the liquid is…

As physics searches for invariants in observations, this paper looks for invariants of probabilistic observation without assuming physical structure. Structure emerges from the basic assumption of science that new information shall lead to…

In this paper we show that interaction-free measurements, which have been object of much discussion in the last few decades, can be explained in a natural and intuitive way in the framework of complex nonlinear quantum physics, contrary to…

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…

Contamination of signals by pickup and interference is a recurrent problem in physics experiments, the suppression of which consumes much time and effort. Techniques are presented which allow the time-domain assessment of mitigation…

The reform of the upper secondary school in Italy has recently introduced physics in the curricula of professional schools, in realities where it was previously absent. Many teachers, often with a temporary position, are obliged to teaching…

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…

Within the last decade, experimentalists have demonstrated their impressive ability to control mechanical modes within mesoscopic objects down to the quantum level: it is now possible to create mechanical Fock states, to entangle mechanical…

The sensory richness of coffee is widely recognised and arises from the complex chemistry and immersion in cultural practices of coffee preparation. In contrast, the physical complexity of espresso has received less attention. The…