Related papers: Teaching Earth Dynamics: What's Wrong with Plate T…
This paper presents a conceptual model describing the medium and long-term co-evolution of natural and socio-economic subsystems of Earth. An economy is viewed as an out-of-equilibrium dissipative structure that can only be maintained with…
General relativity is highly successful in explaining a wide range of gravitational phenomena including the gravitational waves emitted by binary systems and the shadows cast by supermassive black holes. From a modern perspective the theory…
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,…
This is the first in a series of papers that analyze college student beliefs in realms where common astronomy misconceptions are prevalent. Data was collected through administration of an inventory distributed at the end of an introductory…
An argument is made to show that the singularity in the General Theory of Relativity (GTR) is the expression of a non-Machian feature. It can be avoided with a scale-invariant dynamical theory, a property lacking in GTR. It is further…
Convergence theory is an extension of general topology. In contrast with topology, it is closed under some important operations, like exponentiation. With all its advantages, convergence theory remains rather unknown. It is an aim of this…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…
Newtonian gravity can be regarded as a hypothetic-deductive system where the inverse square law is the starting point from which gravitational phenomena are deduced. This operational form of presenting gravity endorses problem solving and…
This article discusses several erroneous claims which appear in textbooks on numerical methods and computational physics. These are not typos or mistakes an individual author has made, but widespread misconceptions. In an attempt to stop…
Traditional lectures are commonly understood to be a teacher-centered mode of instruction where the main aim is a provision of explanations by an educator to the students. Recent literature in higher education overwhelmingly depicts this…
It is a common view in philosophy of physics that thermodynamics is a non-fundamental theory. This is motivated in particular by the fact that thermodynamics is considered to be a paradigmatic example for a theory that can be reduced to…
We argue that taxonomical concept development is vital for planetary science as in all branches of science, but its importance has been obscured by unique historical developments. The literature shows that the concept of planet developed by…
Technology has helped to innovate in the teaching-learning process. Today's students are more demanding actors when it comes to the environment, they have at their disposal to learn, experiment and develop critical thinking. The area of…
A new modelling approach shows how the Earth's hidden vibrations may drive global weather dynamics and atmospheric pressure variations, hinting that the planet's own beat could be imprinted on our climate. The atmospheric rotational…
This is the LaTeX version of my book "Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology'' (Harwood, Chur, Switzerland, 1990). I decided to put it to hep-th, to make it easily available. Many things happened during the 15 years since the time when…
A unified electrodynamic approach to the guided-wave excitation theory is generalized to the waveguiding structures containing a hypothetical space-dispersive medium with drifting charge carriers possessing simultaneously elastic,…
In this paper we extend to a generic class of piecewise smooth dynamical systems a fundamental tool for the analysis of convergence of smooth dynamical systems: contraction theory. We focus on switched systems satisfying Caratheodory…
Certain results of observational cosmology cast critical doubt on the foundations of standard cosmology but leave most cosmologists untroubled. Alternative cosmological models that differ from the Big Bang have been published and defended…
String theoretical ideas might be relevant for particle physics model building. Ideally one would hope to find a unified theory of all fundamental interactions. There are only few consistent string theories in D=10 or 11 space-time…
In the symposium contributions we discuss research in physics education and the consequences of its results for physics teaching. The symposium presents four different aspects of physics teaching and learning, but all of them have…