Related papers: Science of a coffee cup: a physicist walks into a …
Thermodynamics could be seen as an expression of physics at a high epistemic level. As such, its potential as an inductive bias to help machine learning procedures attain accurate and credible predictions has been recently realized in many…
It is generally accepted that Everett's theory of quantum mechanics cannot be experimentally tested as such experiment would involve operations on the observer which are beyond our current technology. We propose an alternative to test…
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
Recently [3] predicted the existence of an intriguing new phenomenon. It was shown that if temperature is suddenly raised at the surface of a sphere the temperature in the interior initially decreases. The authors of [3] gave a thorough…
To increase the attention of students, several physics experiments can be performed at school, as well at home, by using the smartphone as laboratory tools. In the paper we describe a mechanical model of the smartphone's accelerometer,…
Some thoughts are presented on the inter-relation between beauty and truth in science in general and theoretical physics in particular. Some conjectural procedures that can be used to create new ideas, concepts and results are illustrated…
The purpose of the present paper is to clarify, as far as it is possible, the overall picture of experimental results in the field of non-conventional phenomena in nuclear matter published in scientific literature, accumulated in the last…
In this note I go through the `proof' of frequentistic confidence intervals and show what it logically implies concerning the value of a physical quantity given an experimental observation (nothing).
What science does, what science could do, and how to make science work? If we want to know the answers to these questions, we need to be able to uncover the mechanisms of science, going beyond metrics that are easily collectible and…
The so-called "Kelvin water dropper" is a simple experiment demonstrating the spontaneous appearance of induced free charge in droplets emitted through a tube. As Lord Kelvin explained, water droplets spontaneously acquire a net charge…
This paper is concerned with complex macroscopic behaviour arising in many-body systems through the combinations of competitive interactions and disorder, even with simple ingredients at the microscopic level. It attempts to indicate and…
This UIST Vision argues that "touch" input and interaction remains in its infancy when viewed in context of the seen but unnoticed vocabulary of natural human behaviors, activity, and environments that surround direct interaction with…
Some basic sociophysical notions are described by a physicist, tentatively for a sociologically-oriented reader.
This article explains and illustrates the design of a laboratory experience for blind students to measure the inertia of simple objects, in this case, that of a disc around its axis of symmetry. Our adaptation consisted in modifying the…
Effective field theories offer a powerful method to unify diverse models under a small set of control parameters, allowing systematic expansions around well-established theories. These techniques, developed in particle physics, were…
Evaporating colloidal droplets have long been used as model systems to understand capillarity, interfacial transport, and particle assembly, most prominently through the coffee ring effect. In classical descriptions, suspended particles are…
Physicists and physics students have been studied with respect to the variation in ways they expound on their topic of research and a physics problem, respectively. A phenomenographic approach has been employed; six fourth-year physics…
Science students must deal with the errors inherent to all physical measurements and be conscious of the necessity to express their as a best estimate and a range of uncertainty. Errors are routinely classified as statistical or systematic.…
Since the introduction of quantum mechanics, it has been taught mostly as a theoretical subject. It is also viewed as a theory that provides a best understanding of the nature, but which does not have much practical applications in our day…