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Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
Quasistatics is introduced so that it fits smoothly into the standard textbook presentation of electrodynamics. The usual path from statics to general electrodynamics is rather short and surprisingly simple. A closer look reveals however…
Much of astrophysics consists of the study of ionised gas under the influence of gravitational and magnetic fields. Thus, it is not possible to understand the astrophysical universe without a detailed knowledge of the dynamics of magnetised…
This is a review of Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics". The main gist of the review is that the physics of the past three decades has been rich with new discoveries in a large number of domains. The Standard Model, while providing a…
The cosmological constant problem can be understood as the failure of the decoupling principle behind effective field theory, so that some quantities in the low-energy theory are extremely sensitive to the high-energy properties. While this…
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.
Double Field Theory (DFT) is a proposal to incorporate T-duality, a distinctive symmetry of string theory, as a symmetry of a field theory defined on a double configuration space. The aim of this review is to provide a pedagogical…
Misconception is the difference between a student's idea and his scientific concept. Physics learning needs to be designed by teachers to minimize misconceptions. Different diagnostic tools have been developed and used by researchers to…
Physics has a bad press: it is seen by a majority of people as a boring discipline ever since their High School days. There is no glamour to it, just toil and pain, and for many who engaged in it, the end sight is often unemployment. Could…
The paper discusses the basic paradoxes of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. The approaches to solution of these paradoxes are suggested. The first one relies on the influence of the external observer (environment), which disrupts the…
To our best knowledge, there are no problem books on cosmology yet, that would include its spectacular recent achievements. We believe there is a strong need for such now, when cosmology is swiftly becoming a strict and vast science, and…
The majority of current textbooks on device physics at the undergraduate level derive the diode equation based on the diffusion of injected minority carriers. Generally the drift of the majority carriers, or the extent of drift, is not…
Global climate change, extreme climate events, earthquakes and their accompanying natural disasters pose significant risks to humanity. Yet due to the nonlinear feedbacks, strategic interactions and complex structure of the Earth system,…
This paper has pedagogical motivation. It is not uncommon that students have great difficulty in accepting the new concepts of standard special relativity, since these seem contrary to common sense. Experience shows that geometrical or…
Classic inflation, the theory described in textbooks, is based on the idea that, beginning from typical initial conditions and assuming a simple inflaton potential with a minimum of fine-tuning, inflation can create exponentially large…
The presence of low viscosity layers in the mantle is supported by line of geological and geophysical observations. Recent high pressure and temperature investigations indicated that partial carbonate melt should exist at the bottom of the…
We will outline our ideas for teaching in the core mathematics disciplines. They are based on our own experience in teaching at a number of universities in the USA, as well as in Europe. While some of the core ideas stay and have stayed…
The task of modelling and forecasting a dynamical system is one of the oldest problems, and it remains challenging. Broadly, this task has two subtasks - extracting the full dynamical information from a partial observation; and then…
Of the three basic states of matter, liquid is perhaps the most complex. While its flow properties are described by fluid mechanics, its thermodynamic properties are often neglected, and for many years it was widely believed that a general…
An extension of the Bachelardian notion of epistemological profile allows us to establish the appearance of a strong conformist thinking component following certain formulations of the Galilean concept of the relativity of motion, namely…