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Group theory is used in many textbooks of contemporary physics. However, electromagnetic community often considers group theory as an "exotic" tool. Graduate and postgraduate textbooks on electromagnetics and electrodynamics usually do not…
The existence of plate tectonics on the Earth is directly dependent on the internal viscosity contrast, mass of the planet, availability of liquid water and an internal heat source. However, the initial conditions of rotational velocity and…
Both the basic educational contents for students and study programs for science teachers include several topics in physics and astronomy, from the simplest ones to others as advanced as nuclear fusion to explain stellar evolution and…
Even today, the concept of entropy is perceived by many as quite obscure. The main difficulty is analyzed as being fundamentally due to the subjectivity and anthropocentrism of the concept that prevent us to have a sufficient distance to…
A priority of physics instruction is to help students make the connection between the formulae they think they are required to memorize and the real world in which they interact every day. If you ask students to describe a situation in real…
The greatest difficulty that is encountered by students in Thermodynamics classes is to find relationships between variables and solve a total differential equation that relates one thermodynamic state variable to two mutually-independent…
We argue that most advances in science and technology during the past and the present centuries rely on modern physics concepts developed in the early $20$th century. The reliance is so profound that any improvement of literacy of science…
064<p type="texpara" tag="Body Text" et="abstract" bin="clone" >There are two schools, or lines of thought, that try to unify the apparently divergent laws of dynamics and thermodynamics and to explain the observed time-asymmetry of the…
This study investigates the factors that contribute to the forward movement of student desks throughout the school day. We hypothesize that desk movement is influenced not only by classroom floor type but also by the physical…
Recent critiques of the semantic conception of scientific theories suggest that a theory is not best formulated as a collection of models satisfying some set of kinematical or dynamical conditions. Thus it has been argued that additional…
Every physical theory has (at least) two different forms of mathematical equations to represent its target systems: the dynamical (equations of motion) and the kinematical (kinematical constraints). Kinematical constraints are…
Recent advances in our understanding of the Universe have revolutionized our view of its structure, composition and evolution. However, these new ideas have not necessarily been used to improve the teaching of introductory astronomy…
This article discussesl a few of the problems that arise in geophysical fluid dynamics and climate that are associated with the presence of moisture in the air, its condensation and release of latent heat. Our main focus is Earth's…
We show that for an infinite, uniformly charged plate no well defined electric field exists in the framework of electrostatics, because it cannot be defined as a mathematically consistent limit of a solution for a finite plate. We discuss…
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…
It is argued that the tight interconnection between biological, climatological, and geophysical factors in the history of the terrestrial biosphere can teach us something of wider importance regarding the general astrobiological evolution…
Most modern theoretical considerations of the physical world suggest that nature is: (1) field-theoretic, (2) smooth, (3) local, (4) gauged, (5) containing fermions, and (6) non-perturbative. Tautologous as this may sound to experts, it is…
To build insight into the atmosphere and ocean, it is useful to apply qualitative reasoning to predict the geophysical fluid dynamicss of worlds radically different from our own such as exoplanets, earth in Nuclear Winter, other solar…
The modern theory of elasticity and the first law of thermodynamics are cornerstones of engineering science that share the concept of reversibility. Engineering researchers have known for four decades that the modern theory violates the…
In this work, families of kinks are analytically identified in multifield theories with either polynomial or deformed sine-Gordon-type potentials. The underlying procedure not only allows us to obtain analytical solutions for these models,…