Physics Commons^™

Galileo's Contribution To Mechanics, Asim Gangopadhyaya

Physics: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Asim Gangopadhyaya writes about Galileo's contributions to mechanics and physics in this chapter in Where Have All the Heavens Gone? Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina edited by John P. McCarthy and Edmondo F. Lupieri.

The Philosophy And Physics Of Time Travel: The Possibility Of Time Travel, Ramitha Rupasinghe

Honors Capstone Projects

Time travel to the past is an alluring subject for many science fiction writers but is it really science fiction or is there a way to make it happen, possibly in the distant future? In the world of physics, time travel to the future has already been accomplished but time travel to the past seems to be a subject of controversy. Similarly, both philosophers and physicists cannot completely agree on one fundamental question about time: what is it? In this interdisciplinary project, I will explore the fundamental nature of time as a building block to help me understand time travel. …

On Marie Curie And Me, Sharon L. Stephenson

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

When people discover I am a nuclear physicist, they often say, "Oh, like Marie Curie!" And yes, I am like Marie in that I have woman parts, I study nuclei, I have two children and a physicist husband. But had I lived in her time, I would not have been that rare female admitted to the Sorbonne. I could not have quietly made the top scores on the math and physics examinations. I am impulsive and thin-skinned, my occasional cleverness passing for deeper talent. I would probably have been a cleaning girl, pregnant at 15, unable to speak any language …

The Economics Of The Atomic Bomb: Cost And Utilization, Jonathan M. Davis Mr.

Senior Honors Theses

Few moments in human history can be compared to the culmination of events that brought the atomic bomb into creation. It is incredible to contemplate that while a nation was fighting a two front war that spanned from Europe into the Pacific, that the United States was able to utilize the time, energy, brains, materials, manpower, and capital to complete a project in four years. That under any other circumstances would have taken greater than half a century to complete.

First, this thesis will discuss breakthroughs in research that led scientists to believe that the atomic weapons could be built, …

Against Realist Instruction: Superficial Success Masking Catastrophic Failure And An Alternative, Dewey I. Dykstra

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose: Often radical constructivists are confronted with arguments why radical constructivism is wrong. The present work presents a radical constructivist alternative to such arguments: a comparison of the results of two instructional practices, the standard, realistbased instruction and a radical constructivist-based instruction, both in physics courses. Design: Evidence from many studies of student conceptions in standard instruction (Duit 2004) is taken into account. In addition, diagnostic data, pre and post instruction, were collected from over 1,000 students in multiple institutions across the U. S. over a period of about 15 years via an established diagnostic of conceptual understanding of motion …

Objectivity, Information, And Maxwell's Demon, Steven Weinstein

Dartmouth Scholarship

This paper examines some common measures of complexity, structure, and information, with an eye toward understanding the extent to which complexity or information‐content may be regarded as objective properties of individual objects. A form of contextual objectivity is proposed which renders the measures objective, and which largely resolves the puzzle of Maxwell's Demon.

5. Newton, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section VIII: The Development of Modern Science

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was born and educated in England. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and there found the inspiration for his prodigious work that was to synthesize and extend the labors of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and others beyond the wildest dreams of any of them. Newton was the intellectual giant who set the direction of the physical sciences on the paths they were to follow undeviatingly into the twentieth century. [excerpt]

1. The Problem, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XX: Meaning in the Physical Sciences

Newton's laws of motion and their associated definitions encountered their first difficulty near the middle of the nineteenth century.

Newton had designed his theory to describe the behavior of matter in space and time by inventing a relationship between the force on a body and the resulting change in motion of the body. Such a description of nature came to be called mechanical, and a large part of physicists' efforts were directed toward reducing all aspects of physics to mechanics. These efforts were rewarded magnificently in the fields of heat, electricity, and sound, in addition to astronomy and other more …

2. The Theory Of Special Relativity, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XX: Meaning in the Physical Sciences

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published his first work on relativity in 1905, the same year in which he published remarkable papers on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect. At the time he did this work, he was a patent examiner in the Swiss Patent Office. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921 "for his services to the theory of physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect." He became a professor of physics at several German universities, and in 1916, he took a position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.

As the …