物理教育
This article describes five common student misconceptions about succeeding in college-level Physics courses: the miracle finish, the soft hearted professor, an extension of high school, weak areas won't be tested, and passing is more…
This article discusses the advantages of using wireless keypads in the Lecture/classroom. This new technology requires multiple-choice (MC) questions to mate with the keypad entry features of these devices. The format of the traditional MC…
Traditional methods of reporting changes in student responses have focused on class-wide averages. Such models hide information about the switches in responses by individual students over the course of a semester. We extend unpublished work…
Some pedagogical aspects of the formulation of electrodynamics independently of the system of units are commented. Only electrodynamics in vacuum is considered. It is pointed out the efficiency of using a notation system close to SI.
The classical phenomenon of the redshift of light in a static gravitational potential, usually called the gravitational redshift, is described in the literature essentially in two ways: on the one hand the phenomenon is explained through…
This article reports on a student summer project performed in 2006 at the University of Frankfurt. It is addressed to undergraduate students familiar with the basic principles of relativistic quantum mechanics and general relativity. The…
In this paper we introduce a hands-on activity in which introductory astronomy students act as gravitational wave astronomers by extracting information from simulated gravitational wave signals. The process mimics the way true gravitational…
A group of high school students (XII Liceum) in the framework of the Roland Maze Project has built a compact telescope of three Geiger-Muller counters. The connection between the telescope and PC computer was also created and programed by…
The concepts of bare and effective mass are widely used within modern physics. Their meaning is discussed in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses such as solid state physics, nuclear physics and quantum field theory. Here, I discuss…
The spin-statistics connection is obtained in a simple and elementary way for general causal fields by using the parity operation to exchange spatial coordinates in the scalar product of a locally commuting field operator, evaluated at…
I use simple thermodynamic reasoning to argue that at temperatures of order a trillion kelvin, QCD, the theory which describes strongly interacting particles such as protons and neutrons under normal conditions, undergoes a phase transition…
Uniform fields are one of the simplest and most pedagogically useful examples in introductory courses on electrostatics or Newtonian gravity. In general relativity there have been several proposals as to what constitutes a uniform field. In…
Special relativity is no longer a new revolutionary theory but a firmly established cornerstone of modern physics. The teaching of special relativity, however, still follows its presentation as it unfolded historically, trying to convince…
The work describes a general problem, which emphasizes proportional reasoning and probabilistic reasoning skills in the context of planting garlic in a backyard garden. Along with practicing these reasoning skills in a context far-removed…
We describe an educational simulation of some effects within the gas of hard spheres. The focus of the presented simulation is on the comprehension of random character of the velocity of molecules in the gas and of the energy at fixed…
I bring to the attention of the physics community the non-existence of a Putnam Physics Competition in North America despite the fact that the Putnam Mathematical Competition has been well known and highly successful for 70 years.
We present a simple method to determine the mutual inductance $M$ between two coils in a coupled AC circuit by using a digital dual-phase lock-in amplifier. The frequency dependence of the real and imaginary parts is measured as the…
The present situation of the teaching-learning relationship in astronomy is rarely investigated in our country. This is so, even when it is widely recognized that astronomy is an integral discipline, at the crossroads of advances in…
Neste artigo discutimos uma nova demonstracao experimental da independencia das propriedades dos corpos (massa, composicao quimica, forma, etc.) na queda livre. Eh uma das experiencias mais simples, porem uma das mais importantes da…
Most students struggle when faced with complex and ill-structured tasks because the strategies taught in schools and universities simply require finding and applying the correct formulae or strategy to answer well-structured, algorithmic…