All posts under category "Physics / Physics.ed-Ph"
A method is described to empower students to efficiently perform general and literature searches using online resources. The method was tested on undergraduate and graduate students with varying backgrounds with scientific literature. Students involved in this study showed marked improvement in thei
An outreach effort has started at Michigan State University to bring particle physics, the Large Hadron Collider, and the ATLAS experiment to a general audience at the Abrams planetarium on the MSU campus. A team of undergraduate students majoring in physics, communications arts & sciences, and jour
Plain Awful is an imaginary valley on the Andes populated by a highly-imitative, cubical people for which the most criminal offence is to exhibit round objects. The duck family (Scrooge, Donald and nephews) are teaming against Scrooge's worst enemy, Flintheart Glomgold, trying to buy the famous Plai
It is a common practice to fix a vertical gnomon and study the moving shadow cast by it. This shows our local solar time and gives us a hint regarding the season in which we perform the observation. The moving shadow can also tell us our latitude with high precision. In this paper we propose to exch
This article describes an exemplary robot exercise which was conducted in a class for mechatronics students. The goal of this exercise was to engage students in scientific thinking and reasoning, activities which do not always play an important role in their curriculum. The robotic platform presente
Originally an empirical law, nowadays Malus' law is seen as a key experiment to demonstrate the transverse nature of electromagnetic waves, as well as the intrinsic connection between optics and electromagnetism. In this work, a simple and inexpensive setup is proposed to quantitatively verify the n
In this article I explain in detail a method for making small amounts of liquid oxygen in the classroom if there is no access to a cylinder of compressed oxygen gas. I also discuss two methods for identifying the fact that it is liquid oxygen as opposed to liquid nitrogen.
There is a growing consensus that physics majors need to learn computational skills, but many departments are still devoid of computation in their physics curriculum. Some departments may lack the resources or commitment to create a dedicated course or program in computational physics. One way aroun
The paper describes two general problems encountered in computational assignments at the introductory level. First, novice students often treat computer code as almost magic incantations, and like novices in many fields, have trouble creating new algorithms or procedures to solve novel problems. Sec
In this paper the correlation between education, research and macroeconomic strength of countries at a global scale is analyzed on the basis of statistical data published by the UNIDO and OECD. It uses sets of composite indicators describing the economical performance and competitiveness as well as
This article, in English, represents part of the invited talk delivered by the author at the 'Internat.Conf.Majorana Legacy and Phys. XXI century' held at Dep. of Phys.,University of Catania, Italy, in Oct.2006: Conference organized for celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth (in Catania) of
Wherever old Universities exist [in Europe, for example: Italy being not the last one], there can be found Scientific Instruments of Historical Interest, e.g., for Physics -which is the case we are concerned with here;- even if proper attention has been paid to such an exceptional heritage only duri
The evaluation of variation in oscillation time period of a simple pendulum as its mass varies proves a rich source of discussion in a physics class-room, overcoming erroneous notions carried forward by students as to what constitutes a pendulum's length due to picking up only the results of approxi
In this paper we revise the main aspects of the Hamiltonian analogy: the fact that optical paths are completely analogous to mechanical trajectories. We follow Schr'{o}dinger's original idea and go beyond this analogy by changing over from the Hamilton's principal function $S$ to the wave function $
Galileo determined distances to stars based on the assumption that stars were suns, the apparent sizes of stars as seen through his telescope, and basic geometry. However, the apparent sizes that he measured were the result of diffraction and not related to the actual sizes of the stars. Galileo's m
In this article we present an analytic solution of the famous problem of diffraction and interference of electrons through one and two slits (for simplicity, only the one-dimensional case is considered). In addition to exact formulas, we exhibit various approximations of the electron distribution wh
That water expands when freezing is a well-known fact, and it is at the basis of an experiment that is often involuntary performed with beer bottles in freezers. But why does the water behave this way? And, more difficult, how can one illustrate this phenomenon in simple terms?
Here we propose two methods to get electroluminescence images from photovoltaic cells in a school or home lab.
Happy end-of-the-year evening and night events provide good opportunities to explain the phases of the moon. The need for such moon phase education is once again demonstrated, through an investigation of illustrations on Santa Claus and Christmas gift wrap and in children's books, in two countries w
Two simple exercises are solved, which educators can use to awake interest of their students in subtleties of the CERN Neutrino beam to Grand Sasso (CNGS) experiment. The first one is about the statistical error of the average departure time of neutrinos from CERN. The second one about a hypothetica
I reconsider the problem of a raindrop falling through mist, collecting mass, and generalize it to allow an arbitrary power-law form for the accretion rate. I show that the coupled differential equations can be solved by the simple trick of temporarily eliminating time (t) in favor of the raindrop's
Enter keywords to search articles