Related papers: Energy flow lines as light paths: a didactical ana…

Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive…

Machine learning techniques are being increasingly used as flexible non-linear fitting and prediction tools in the physical sciences. Fitting functions that exhibit multiple solutions as local minima can be analysed in terms of the…

Random walks of particles on a lattice are a classical paradigm for the microscopic mechanism underlying diffusive processes. In deterministic walks, the role of space and time can be reversed, and the microscopic dynamics can produce quite…

Two-dimensional networks of ordered quantum dots beyond the percolation threshold are studied, as typical example of conducting nanostructures with quenched random disorder. Theory predicts anomalous diffusion with stretched-exponential…

We analyze circumstances under which the microscopic dynamics of particles which are driven by a forced, gradient-type flow can be consistently interpreted as a Markovian diffusion process. Special attention is paid to discriminating…

One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…

Light beams offer many degrees of freedom to be explored in discrete and continuous domains. In addition to the possibility of entangling photons in these many degrees of freedom, it makes light a very useful and versatile tool for quantum…

Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…

First-order logic is typically presented as the study of deduction in a setting with elementary quantification. In this paper, we take another vantage point and conceptualize first-order logic as a linear space that encodes "plausibility".…

The question of whether it is possible or not to surpass the speed of light is already centennial. The special theory of relativity took the existence of a speed limit as a principle, the light postulate, which has proven to be enormously…

A novel approach to study transmission through waveguides in terms of optical streamlines is presented. This theoretical framework combines the computational performance of beam propagation methods with the possibility to monitor the…

We describe the development of a course of quantum mechanics for secondary school designed to address the challenges related to the revision of classical knowledge, to the building of a well-organized knowledge structure on the discipline,…

These lectures have been given to particle physicists, mostly experimentalists and very briefly and at a pedestrian level review the problems of dark matter. The content of the lectures is the following: 1. Introduction. 2. Cosmological…

A particular class of flat Emergent Universe scenario is studied in light of recent observational data. Observationally permissible ranges of values are obtained for the model parameters. The class of model studied here can accommodate…

We develop a discrete Boltzmann-type model that uses dynamics in phase space to describe the behavior of traffic flows. Firstly, we model the traffic flow at mesoscopic scale using dynamics in phase space, which is considered as an…

This work presents a microscopic model to describe pedestrian flows based on the social force theory. The aim of this study is twofold: (1) developing a realistic model that can be used as a tool for designing pedestrian-friendly…

Physical learning is an emerging paradigm in science and engineering whereby (meta)materials acquire desired macroscopic behaviors by exposure to examples. So far, it has been applied to static properties such as elastic moduli and…

We report on a large-scale study of student learning of quantum tunneling in 4 traditional and 4 transformed modern physics courses. In the transformed courses, which were designed to address student difficulties found in previous research,…

We explore the relationship between mechanical systems describing the motion of a particle with the mechanical systems describing a continuous medium. More specifically, we will study how the so-called intermediate integrals or fields of…

We believe that economists have much to learn from educational research practices and related pedagogical innovations in other disciplines, in particular physics education. In this paper we identify three key features of physics education…