Biblioteca Digital

Apresenta-se neste trabalho uma proposta de inserção da Física Moderna e Contemporânea ao currículo da escola média, de forma integrada aos demais campos e aspectos da Física, tendo como referências textos com contextos, a concepção do conhecimento em rede e o aprendizado a partir do desenvolvimento de competências e habilidades. Essa proposição é ambientada pela análise de trabalhos acadêmicos e documentos educacionais oficiais que revelam uma preocupação crescente, por parte de educadores, com a inclusão da nova Física na escola média, por sua importância prática e cultural. Para auxiliar a análise do papel de conexão entre os diversos campos da Física, e desta para com outras disciplinas, que pode ser desempenhado pela Física Moderna e Contemporânea, são trabalhados alguns conceitos e instrumentos teóricos como texto, contexto, hipertexto, rede de significados, competências e habilidades. Como ilustração da inserção curricular proposta, são analisados diversos trechos de uma coletânea de fascículos destinados à escola média, bem como o texto dessa coletânea, especialmente voltado à apresentação da nova Física. Para melhor explicitar os avanços e as limitações desse texto, outros livros destinados à escola média que abordam o mesmo tema são analisados e comparados. Procura-se demonstrar que uma inserção contextualizada de Física Moderna e Contemporânea na escola média é mais eficaz com base em uma reformulação curricular ampla...

É destacada a importância de uma atualização da Física abordada na escola média, através da inserção de temas de Física Moderna e Contemporânea. Toma-se como pressuposto que um dos principais fatores com potencial para promover essa inserção é a atenção à formação inicial de professores. Assim, pretende-se investigar como disciplinas de conhecimento científico específico, em cursos de licenciatura, estão ou poderiam estar contribuindo para a prática futura de seus alunos. Para essa análise, buscou-se partir de um diagnóstico concreto, levantando características, propostas e dificuldades de aprendizado, em uma disciplina de Física Moderna. Dessa abordagem, emergiu a percepção de que os problemas observados podem ser mais estruturais do que conjunturais. Isso conduziu as investigações para as questões relacionadas à própria organização e seleção de conteúdos, através da análise dos livros didáticos de física moderna no ensino superior e no ensino médio. O entendimento sobre tal estrutura e organização ultrapassa a natureza do conhecimento e revela a existência de relações implícitas com a dinâmica cultural nas instituições de ensino. O aprofundamento dessas questões nos levou a propor que grande parte das dificuldades tem origem no descompasso de finalidades formativas do ensino superior e médio...

The primary aim, in teaching physics, is that the student should gain an understanding of the principles of physics and how to apply them to different problems. A secondary aim is to allow the students to appreciate the scientific approach and significance of it in the evolution of science and society. One approach for the second aim has been to include 'historical material' in physics textbooks. The quantity of the historical material included is quite diverse, from textbooks with a very strong historical approach to others without any historical material. The quality of the material included is also diverse. In this article we focus on the development of the historical material, i.e. a certain historical development, in a specific textbook (Sears & Zemansky's University Physics) over a number of editions. The aim is to see when and how the historical material is included and how well it describes the actual history. Will the physics adapt to history or vice-verse. The event of interest is the introduction of the Blackbody radiation formula or Planck's radiation formula. This is well known out of an historical perspective, but also a case where a quasi-historical is quite common in textbooks.

Towards the end of the 19th century, Kelvin pronounced as the "clouds of physics" 1) the failure of the Michelson-Morely experiment to detect an ether wind, 2) the violation of the classical mechanical equipartition theorem in statistical thermodynamics. And he believed that the removal of these clouds would bring physics to an end. But as we know, the removal of these clouds led to the two great breakthoughts of modern physics: 1) The theory of relativity, and 2) to quantum mechanics. Towards the end of the 20th century more clouds of physics became apparent. They are 1) the riddle of quantum gravity, 2) the superluminal quantum correlations, 3) the small cosmological constant. Furthermore, there is the riddle of dark energy making up 70% of the physical universe, the non-baryonic cold dark matter making up 26% and the very small initial entropy of the universe. An attempt is made to explain the importance of these clouds for the future of physics. Conjectures for a possible solution are presented. they have to do with Einstein's last query: "Can quantum mechanics be derived general relativity", and with the question is there an ether?; Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures

The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by a variety of educators and physics education researchers. One reason for this extensive use is that many of the items on the FCI have strong distractor choices that correspond to students' alternate conceptions in mechanics. Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common alternate conceptions of introductory physics students and explicitly take into account students' initial knowledge state in their instructional design. Here, we discuss research involving the FCI to evaluate the pedagogical content knowledge of both instructors and teaching assistants (TAs) of varying teaching experience. For each item on the FCI, the instructors and TAs were asked to identify the most common incorrect answer choice of introductory physics students. We also discussed the responses individually with a few instructors. Then, we used the FCI pre-test and post-test data from a large population (~900) of introductory physics students to assess the pedagogical content knowledge of physics instructors and TAs. We find that while both physics instructors and TAs, on average, performed better than random guessing at identifying introductory students' difficulties with FCI content...

In this paper I address the difference between knowledge-inquiry and wisdom-inquiry (concepts introduced by N. Maxwell) in nuclear physics education, specifically in senior-level textbooks for first-degree physics students. Following on from an earlier study of 57 such textbooks, I focus here on a remarkable use of literary quotations in one of them. The nuclear physics textbook Particles and Nuclei: an Introduction to the Physical Concepts, by B. Povh et al opens with a (German) quotation from Max und Moritz which has been rendered, in the celebrated translation by C. T. Brooks, as "Not alone to solve the double/ Rule of Three shall man take trouble;/ But must hear with pleasure Sages/ Teach the wisdom of the ages." What the student gets however is technical material followed abruptly at the very end by the advice (from The Book of Jeremiah) "And it shall be, when thou hast made an end of reading this book, that thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of Euphrates". From a study of these and other quotations and other features of this book I infer a strong desire to express something important about wisdom, which is however even more powerfully suppressed by the ideology of knowledge-inquiry. At the end of this paper I discuss briefly wisdom of the ages and wisdom for our age.; Comment: 18 pages...

It is a quite common view among people, that are not aware of the developments in modern physics, that it is part of human nature to substitute religious faith in places where there is no knowledge. Therefore, an increase in knowledge would lead to a decrease in the necessity of faith. Further, it is argued that, ideally speaking, a full knowledge of the laws of nature would make obsolete any sort of religious faith and would ultimately allow a complete control of nature by man. Since referring to nature, such views must be founded in the natural sciences of which physics is the most fundamental. Therefore, the question whether such views are compatible with the current state of natural sciences is ultimately decided in physics. Indeed, it is likely that these simplistic views have their origin in the world view generated by the successes of Newtonian physics from the middle of the 17th century until the beginning of the 20th century which viewed the physical world as a type of mechanical clock in which the motion of the gears affect each other in a precise and predictable way. In particular, the paper points out that the above views are no longer supported by current physics and that abstracted world views cannot be considered as part of natural sciences...

The broad coverage of the search for the Higgs boson in the mainstream media is a relative novelty for high energy physics (HEP) research, whose achievements have traditionally been limited to scholarly literature. This paper illustrates the results of a scientometric analysis of HEP computing in scientific literature, institutional media and the press, and a comparative overview of similar metrics concerning representative particle physics measurements. The picture emerging from these scientometric data documents the scientific impact and social perception of HEP computing. The results of this analysis suggest that improved communication of the scientific and social role of HEP computing would be beneficial to the high energy physics community.; Comment: To be published in the Proceedings of CHEP 2013 (Computing in High Energy Physics)

A concise survey of the contribution of D.I. Blokhintsev to the quantum physics, including solid state physics, physics of metals, surface physics, statistical physics and optics is given. These achievements have been considered in the context of modern development of these fields of physics.; Comment: 12 pages; Plenary Talk, given at XIII Int. Conf. on Selected Problems of Modern Theoretical Physics, Dubna, 22--27 June 2008; corrected typos

The image of physics is connected with simple "mechanical" deterministic events: that an apple always falls down, that force equals mass times acceleleration. Indeed, applications of such concept to social or historical problems go back two centuries (population growth and stabilisation, by Malthus and by Verhulst) and use "differential equations", as recently revierwed by Vitanov and Ausloos [2011]. However, since even today's computers cannot follow the motion of all air molecules within one cubic centimeter, the probabilistic approach has become fashionable since Ludwig Boltzmann invented Statistical Physics in the 19th century. Computer simulations in Statistical Physics deal with single particles, a method called agent-based modelling in fields which adopted it later. Particularly simple are binary models where each particle has only two choices, called spin up and spin down by physicists, bit zero and bit one by computer scientists, and voters for the Republicans or for the Democrats in American politics (where one human is simulated as one particle). Neighbouring particles may influence each other, and the Ising model of 1925 is the best-studied example of such models. This text will explain to the reader how to program the Ising model on a square lattice (in Fortran language); starting from there the readers can build their own computer programs. Some applications of Statistical Physics outside the natural sciences will be listed.; Comment: 17 pages for conference "Science Matters"...

In part I (pp. 1-10) of this article, I provide an analysis and overview of some notable definitions, works and thoughts concerning discrete physics (a.k.a. digital philosophy, digital physics or digital cosmology) that propose finite, discrete and deterministic characteristics for the physical world. Particular attention is given to theories which suggest cellular automata, as the basis of a (or the only) perfect mathematical deterministic model for the physical reality. In part II (the main part, pp.11-104, Ref. [37]) of this article, I've presented a new algebraic matrix approach based on the theory of Rings (including the Integral Domains). On the basis of this approach, by linearization (and simultaneous parameterization) followed by quantization of the relativistic energy-momentum relation, a unique set of tensor field equations are derived. These tensor equations are shown to correspond to the general forms of equations of motion of all the fundamental fields of physics, including the laws of the fundamental forces of nature (i.e. gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear field equations), the relativistic particle wave-equations, and their generalizations. Notably, this result is primarily mathematical, assuming the relativistic energy-momentum is discrete (that is a basic and primary quantum mechanical assumption). In particular...

The perspectives of introductory classical physics students can often negatively influence how those students later interpret quantum phenomena when taking an introductory course in modern physics. A detailed exploration of student perspectives on the interpretation of quantum physics is needed, both to characterize student understanding of physics concepts, and to inform how we might teach traditional content. Our previous investigations of student perspectives on quantum physics have indicated they can be highly nuanced, and may vary both within and across contexts. In order to better understand the contextual and often seemingly contradictory stances of students on matters of interpretation, we interviewed 19 students from four introductory modern physics courses taught at the University of Colorado. We find that students have attitudes and opinions that often parallel the stances of expert physicists when arguing for their favored interpretations of quantum mechanics, allowing for more nuanced characterizations of student perspectives in terms of three key interpretive themes. We present a framework for characterizing student perspectives on quantum mechanics, and demonstrate its utility in interpreting the sometimes-contradictory nature of student responses to previous surveys. We further find that students most often vacillate in their responses when what makes intuitive sense to them is not in agreement with what they consider to be a correct response...

Validation is often defined as the process of determining the degree to which a model is an accurate representation of the real world from the perspective of its intended uses. Validation is crucial as industries and governments depend increasingly on predictions by computer models to justify their decisions. In this article, we survey the model validation literature and propose to formulate validation as an iterative construction process that mimics the process occurring implicitly in the minds of scientists. We thus offer a formal representation of the progressive build-up of trust in the model, and thereby replace incapacitating claims on the impossibility of validating a given model by an adaptive process of constructive approximation. This approach is better adapted to the fuzzy, coarse-grained nature of validation. Our procedure factors in the degree of redundancy versus novelty of the experiments used for validation as well as the degree to which the model predicts the observations. We illustrate the new methodology first with the maturation of Quantum Mechanics as the arguably best established physics theory and then with several concrete examples drawn from some of our primary scientific interests: a cellular automaton model for earthquakes...

We start by remarks on the scientific and societal context of today's theoretical physics. Major classes of models for physics to be explored at the LHC are then reviewed. This leads us to propose an LHC timeline and a list of potential effects on theoretical physics and the society. We then explore three conceptual questions connected with the LHC physics: symmetry (and symmetry breaking), effective field theory, and fine tuning.; Comment: 59 pages, 6 figures

This work examines how experiences in one disciplinary domain (biology) can impact the relationship a student builds with another domain (physics). We present a model for disciplinary relationships using the constructs of identity, affect, and epistemology. With these constructs we examine an ethnographic case study of a student who experienced a significant shift in her relationship with physics. We describe how this shift demonstrates (1) a stronger identification with physics, (2) a more mixed affective stance towards physics, and (3) more expert-like ways of knowing in physics. We argue that recruiting the students relationship with biology into experiences of learning physics impacted her relationship with physics as well as her sense of how physics and biology are linked.

Mathematics is a critical part of much scientific research. Physics in particular weaves math extensively into its instruction beginning in high school. Despite much research on the learning of both physics and math, the problem of how to effectively include math in physics in a way that reaches most students remains unsolved. In this paper, we suggest that a fundamental issue has received insufficient exploration: the fact that in science, we don't just use math, we make meaning with it in a different way than mathematicians do. In this reflective essay, we explore math as a language and consider the language of math in physics through the lens of cognitive linguistics. We begin by offering a number of examples that show how the use of math in physics differs from the use of math as typically found in math classes. We then explore basic concepts in cognitive semantics to show how humans make meaning with language in general. The critical elements are the roles of embodied cognition and interpretation in context. Then we show how a theoretical framework commonly used in physics education research, resources, is coherent with and extends the ideas of cognitive semantics by connecting embodiment to phenomenological primitives and contextual interpretation to the dynamics of meaning making with conceptual resources...

The purpose of this paper is to show the magic of physics by showing the physics of magic. What usually makes magic tricks interesting is that something unexpected occurs. Similarly, demonstrations are interesting inasmuch as they produce something unexpected. Since expectations are linked to preconceptions, a demonstration making use of a flaw in a preconception will result in something unexpected. Given the numerous misconceptions in physics, many demonstrations can be dressed up as magic tricks. The first objective of this paper is to share with other physics teachers the excitement of creating and using magical classroom demonstrations. The second objective is to provide interested instructors with practical means to convert a classical demonstration into a magic trick. To illustrate the procedure, two classical demonstrations will be re-presented as the magic tricks we have presented in our courses. The final goal is to use current ideas in educational psychology to explain why using magic has worked so well in our courses in providing students with a new impetus to learn physics. This description is not meant to be formal, but proposes a theoretical model that fits our classroom observations.; Comment: Submitted to: The Physics Teacher

Since 2006, the Pigelleto's Summer School of Physics is an important appointment for orienting students toward physics. It is organized as a full immersion school on actual topics in physics or in fields rarely pursued in high school, i.e. quantum mechanics, new materials, energy resources. The students, usually forty, are engaged in many activities in laboratory and forced to become active participants. Furthermore, they are encouraged in cooperating in small groups in order to present and share the achieved results. In the last years, the school became a training opportunity for younger teachers which are involved in programming and realization of selected activities. The laboratory activities with students are usually supervised by a young and an expert teacher in order to fix the correct methodology.; Comment: 3 pages, Twelfth International Symposium Frontiers of Fundamental Physics (FFP12), Udine 21-23 November 2011

In this lecture, the physics potential for the e+e- linear collider experiments ILC and CLIC is reviewed. The experimental conditions are compared to those at hadron colliders and their intrinsic value for precision experiments, complementary to the hadron colliders, is discussed. The detector concepts for ILC and CLIC are outlined in their most important aspects related to the precision physics. Highlights from the physics program and from the benchmark studies are given. It is shown that linear colliders are a promising tool, complementing the LHC in essential ways to test the Standard Model and to search for new physics.; Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, presented at the 12th International School-Seminar "The Actual Problems of Microworld Physics" in Gomel, Belarus, July 22 - August 2, 2013

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 and sometimes emulated the reductionist program of mainstream physics, it has also educated the physics community about some of the generic behaviors of strongly nonlinear systems. Dramatic examples are the insights we have gained into the ``emergent'' phenomena of chaos, cascading instabilities, turbulence, self-organization, fractal structure, power-law variability, anomalous scaling, threshold dynamics, creep, fracture, and so on. In all of these examples, relatively simple models have been able to explain the recurring features of apparently very complex signals and fields. It appears that the future of the intricate relation between physics and geophysics will be as exciting as its past has been characterized by a mutual fascination. Physics departments in our universities should capitalize on this trend to attract and retain young talent motivated to address problems that really matter for the future of the planet. A pressing topic with huge impact on populations and that is challenging enough for both physics and geophysics communities to work together like never before is the understanding and prediction of extreme events.; Comment: 6 pages...