Related papers: Physics Magic
The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…
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…
Quantum mechanics is a field often considered very mathematical, abstract, and unintuitive. One way some instructors are hoping to help familiarize their students with these complex topics is to have the students see quantum effects in…
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…
This paper is concerned with complex macroscopic behaviour arising in many-body systems through the combinations of competitive interactions and disorder, even with simple ingredients at the microscopic level. It attempts to indicate and…
A major question in philosophy of science involves the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Why should mathematics, created or discovered, with nothing empirical in mind be so perfectly suited to describe the laws of the…
In this paper we give the outline of a lecture given to undergraduate students aiming at understanding why physicists are so much interested in the Higgs boson. The lecture has been conceived for students not yet familiar with advanced…
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…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
Writing and argumentation are critical to both professional physics and physics education. However, the skill of making an extended argument in writing is often overlooked in physics classrooms, apart from certain practices like lab…
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…
We introduce an approach to the foundations of physics that is more in line with the foundations of mathematics. The idea is to examine current theories and find a set of starting physical assumptions that are sufficient to rederive them,…
Differentiable physics provides a new approach for modeling and understanding the physical systems by pairing the new technology of differentiable programming with classical numerical methods for physical simulation. We survey the rapidly…
The modeling theory of instruction is widely applied and highly successful in high-school instruction, and seldom in university physics. One reason is lack of familiarity with models in the physics classroom. Ongoing curriculum development…
What does it mean to "make sense" of physics? It's not a simple question. Most people have an intuitive feeling for when things do (or do not) make sense to them. But, putting this feeling into words--especially actionable words--is another…
We investigated the effects of student-generated problems on exams. The process was gradual with some training throughout the semester. Initial results were highly positive with the students involved performing significantly better, and…
In order to describe natural phenomena, science develops sophisticated models that use mathematical and formal languages which seem, and often are, very far from common experience. When a phenomenon is not accessible to our senses, its…
The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…
This paper summarizes some challenges encountered and best practices established in several years of teaching Machine Learning for the Physical Sciences at the undergraduate and graduate level. I discuss motivations for teaching ML to…
Several examples are used to illustrate how we deal cavalierly with infinities and unphysical systems in physics. Upon examining these examples in the context of infinities from Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers, the only known…