相关论文: Teaching Earth Dynamics: What's Wrong with Plate T…
Leading theories for the presence of plate tectonics on Earth typically appeal to the role of present day conditions in promoting rheological weakening of the lithosphere. However, it is unknown whether the conditions of the early Earth…
If a cat, a cannonball, and an economics textbook are all dropped from the same height, they fall to the ground with exactly the same acceleration under the influence of gravity. This equality of gravitational accelerations of different…
A vast concourse of events and phenomena occur in nature that may be interrelated by a entropy-maximization technique that provides a comprehensible explanation of a range of physical problems, integrating in a new framework the universal…
We live at a time of contradictory messages about how successfully we understand gravity. General Relativity seems to work very well in the Earth's immediate neighborhood, but arguments abound that it needs modification at very small and/or…
Expanding our knowledge of student difficulties in advanced undergraduate electromagnetism is essential if we are to develop effective instructional interventions. Drawing on an analysis of course materials, in-class observations and…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
Soft or Deformable Plate Tectonics in the sphere must follow geometric rules inferred from the orthographic projection. An analytic equivalent of this geometry can be derived by the application of Potential Field Methods in the case of…
Constructor theory seeks to express all fundamental scientific theories in terms of a dichotomy between possible and impossible physical transformations - those that can be caused to happen and those that cannot. This is a departure from…
These lecture notes are based on a tutorial given in 2017 at a plasma physics winter school in Les Houches. Their aim is to provide a self-contained graduate-student level introduction to the theory and modelling of the dynamo effect in…
Understanding the principles of geophysical phenomena is an essential and challenging task. "Model-driven" approaches have supported the development of geophysics for a long time; however, such methods suffer from the curse of…
Single particle models are sufficient for many topics in introductory physics courses, but become misleading when applied to situations involving changes in internal energy. This paper merges two parallel attempts to reform the teaching of…
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…
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…
The purpose of this paper is to show that the composite photon theory measures up well against the Standard Model's elementary photon theory. This is done by comparing the two theories area by area. Although the predictions of quantum…
This a book is for those who would like to learn something about special and general relativity beyond the usual textbooks, about quantum field theory, the elegant Fock-Schwinger-Stueckelberg proper time formalism, the elegant description…
Plate tectonics is a geophysical process currently unique to Earth, has an important role in regulating the Earth's climate, and may be better understood by identifying rocky planets outside our solar system with tectonic activity. The key…
What is physics? What are the limits of what physics can say about the world? In seeking ever-broader theoretical `umbrellas' for physical phenomena, we are seeking unifying principles. Emergent phenomena have turned out to be some of the…
It is becoming common to hear teaching advice about spending more time on the "physics of the problem" so that students will get more physical insight and develop a stronger intuition that can be very helpful when thinking about physics…
As 2005, the International Year of Physics, comes to an end, two physicists working primarily in geophysical research reflect on how geophysics is not an applied physics. Although geophysics has certainly benefited from progress in physics…
During recent collaboration with colleagues to revise our institution's general-education curriculum, I encountered many perceptions of what we mean by the Natural Sciences. I was surprised to find that perceptions of scientific pedagogy…