Related papers: Introductory physics: The new scholasticism
We examine the difficulties that introductory physics students, undergraduate physics majors, and physics graduate students have with concepts related to conductors and insulators covered in introductory physics by giving written tests and…
Within the continuous endeavour of improving the efficiency and resilience of air transport, the trend of using concepts and metrics from statistical physics has recently gained momentum. This scientific discipline, which integrates…
A brief account of some recent controversies about the teaching and learning of physics is presented. A shorter version of this outcome was accepted by The Physics Teacher, but publication is still pending.
These lectures notes contain an introduction to General Relativity. They are addressed to a general mathematical audience with no specific background in physics. The goal is to motivate and explain Einstein's theory of gravity and discuss…
Training students in basic concepts of physics, such as the ones related to mass, volume, or density, is much more complicated than just stating the underlying definitions and laws. One of the reasons for this is that most students have…
Solving exercise problems by yourself is a vital part of developing a mechanical understanding. Yet, most mechanics lectures have more than 200 participants, so the workload for manually creating and correcting assignments limits the number…
Physics students can encounter difficulties in physics problem solving as a result of failing to use knowledge that they have but do not perceive as relevant or appropriate. In previous work the authors have demonstrated that some of these…
The physics community explores and explains the physical world through a blend of theoretical and experimental studies. The future of physics as a discipline depends on training of students in both the theoretical and experimental aspects…
Consider a reinforcement learning problem where an agent has access to a very large amount of information about the environment, but it can only take very few actions to accomplish its task and to maximize its reward. Evidently, the main…
Prior research suggests that many students believe that the magnitude of the static frictional force is always equal to its maximum value. Here, we examine introductory students' ability to learn from analogical reasoning (with different…
The modeling theory of instruction is widely applied and highly successful in high-school instruction, and seldom in university physics. One reason is lack of familiarity with models in the physics classroom. Ongoing curriculum development…
An elementary understanding of the relevant length, mass and energy scales at the molecular level can be used to explain the order of magnitude of material properties such as mass density, latent heat, surface tension, elastic moduli and…
Problem solving is central to physics instruction. Results from Physics Education Research (PER), however, demonstrate that traditional ways of teaching with problem solving are inefficient and ineffective for promoting true physics…
This pedagogical note revisits the concept of electromagnetic helicity in classical systems. In particular, magnetic helicity and its role in mean field dynamo theories is briefly discussed highlighting the major mathematical inconsistency…
Crucial observational tests of gravity physics are reviewed. Such tests are able to clarify the key question on the nature of gravitational interaction: is gravity the curvature of space? or is gravity a matter field in Minkowski flat space…
We examine the relationship between homework completion and exam performance for students having different physics aptitudes for five different semesters of an introductory electricity and magnetism course. In our analysis, we plot exam…
The role of the observers is frequently obscured in the literature, either by writing equations in a coordinate system implicitly pertaining to some specific observer or by entangling the invariance and the observer dependence of physical…
These are pedagogical lecture notes on hydrodynamic fluctuations in normal relativistic fluids. The lectures discuss correlation functions of conserved densities in thermal equilibrium, interactions of the hydrodynamic modes, an effective…
Gravity is one of the fundamental forces of Nature, and it is the dominant force in most astronomical systems. In common with all other phenomena, gravity must obey the principles of special relativity. In particular, gravitational forces…
Inertial forces are not intuitive; therefore, interesting examples are great help for learners. In this paper, we examine simple models for International Space Station (ISS) and airplane flying and identify the inertial forces involved and…