Related papers: Celebrating the Physics in Geophysics
While speed is an ubiquitous concept in physics, its inverse - known as slowness - sometimes proves more relevant. We discuss some case studies within classical physics where such a notion is fruitful, before exploring how it can be…
Geoscience data often have to rely on strong priors in the face of uncertainty. Additionally, we often try to detect or model anomalous sparse data that can appear as an outlier in machine learning models. These are classic examples of…
Gravitation as a fundamental interaction that governs all phenomena at large and very small scales, but still not well understood at a quantum level, is a missing cardinal link to unification of all physical interactions. Problems of the…
As Physics did in previous centuries, there is currently a common dream of extracting generic laws of nature in economics, sociology, neuroscience, by focalising the description of phenomena to a minimal set of variables and parameters,…
The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
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…
The size or energy of diverse structures or phenomena in geoscience appears to follow power-law distributions. A rigorous statistical analysis of such observations is tricky, though. Observables can span several orders of magnitude, but the…
Dissipative phenomena manifest in multiple mechanical systems. In this dissertation, different geometric frameworks for modelling non-conservative dynamics are considered. The objective is to generalize several results from conservative…
A difficult challenge in physics education is to design professional development programs for teachers, which can lead to fundamental changes in their practise. We report all activities for physics teachers in the context of the National…
With the two most profound conceptual revolutions of XXth century physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, which have culminated into relativistic spacetime geometry and quantum gauge field theory as the principles for gravity and the…
One of the biggest revelations of 20th century physics, is virtually unheard of outside the inner circles of particle physics. This is the gauge theory, the foundation for how all physical interactions are described and a guiding principle…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
This book is devoted to an informal discussion of patterns constructed for treating physical problems. Such patterns, when sufficiently formalized, are usually referred as "models", and tents to be applied not only in physics, but conquer…
Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…
I briefly summarized some recent work which uses the techniques of effective field theory to make quantum predictions in general relativity. In contrast to conventional expectations, these are in fact well behaved. The leading quantum…
The ocean and the atmosphere, and hence the climate, are governed at large scale by interactions between pressure gradient, Coriolis and buoyancy forces. This leads to a quasi-geostrophic balance in which, in a two-dimensional-like fashion,…
This article looks at philosophical aspects and questions that modern astrophysical research gives rise to. Other than cosmology, astrophysics particularly deals with understanding phenomena and processes operating at "intermediate" cosmic…
How should we interpret physical theories, and especially quantum theory, if we drop the assumption that we should treat it as an exact description of the whole Universe? I expound and develop the claim that physics is about the study of…
The role of student experiences in physics beyond the classroom which support their development has been the subject of exciting research in recent years. Results, typically from small studies at single institutions, have illustrated that…
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…