The discovery of nuclear fission was one of the most dramatic scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century. Within a few years, the fantastic energy latent in the nuclei of atoms would be powering reactors and bombs, a development that fundamentally changed the relationship between physics and human affairs. To drive home the magnitude of this…

A well-known conclusion from elementary ballistic trajectory analysis is that the horizontal range of a projectile is maximized for a launch angle of 45°. The derivation of this result assumes that the launch speed is the same for all possible launch angles, but this neglects the fact that the work done against gravity by the launching mechanism…

Lissajous figures, and other harmonic curves, straddle the line between physics and art. The sight of a harmonograph tracing out its curves in the Amherst College physics library in 1957 was certainly one of the things that drew young Tom Greenslade into physics and inspired a career-long appreciation of them.

Newton married her, Einstein eloped with her, and many a physicist fell head over heels for her beauty, charm, and heavenly elegance! This paper is a heartfelt personal attempt to make sense of the indescribable love many physicists have for their subject matter, physics. My muse's nickname is Feezya and this is how she shall be referred to for…

This is a fundamental and pedagogical work in quantum physics/chemistry, where we try to illustrate the Mulliken's question, "What are the electrons really doing in molecules?". And we also briefly review the development of the most popular numerical approaches in computational chemistry. We examine in a novel approach, how we can…

From ancient times, the different features of planets and moons have created a huge interest. Aristarchus was one of the first to study the relative relations among Earth, Moon, and Sun. This interest has remained until today, and therefore it is always relevant to make this knowledge more appealing to the younger generations. Nowadays, smartphone…

Experiment is understood as a core activity in science education as well as science in general. Despite many efforts to improve science education in the laboratory, a cookbook style of verification experiments often dominate school science. In this study, we conducted an open laboratory activity that provided students with an opportunity to think…

This study explored how scientific ideas interacted in college students' scientific explanations using text analysis techniques and network analysis. A task was given to first-year college students asking them to answer a series of physics questions associated with a computer simulation. Students' written responses were classified into three…

A phone emitting sound of a fixed frequency is sliding on an inclined plane and approaching a second phone kept at the bottom of the plane. The detected frequency versus time data by the second phone are used to calculate the acceleration of the sliding phone. The primary objective of this paper is to calculate the sliding friction between the…

As students learn physics, they are often required to reason about the behavior of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena, and to synthesize prior knowledge from several different areas of physics to construct understanding of new ideas. This can be a tremendously difficult cognitive task for novice students, especially when the unfamiliar…

Collisions are a key topic in physics and engineering education. An experiment with multiple body one-dimensional collisions is presented, aiming to measure relevant physical quantities by tracking the motion of the system of particles during the collision. Relations between different physical quantities can be explored in the experiment, such as…

Igniting excitement for physics in our students is a goal of every instructor. In this paper, we discuss a unique example of the concept of density, a subject that is rarely viewed as intriguing by students. By combining a problem involving dinosaurs and an effective density, our students' interest is often captured through calculating an…

We propose a semiquantitative experiment that associates video-analysis and ordinary procedures of experimental physics whose objective is to investigate the dual character of Oobleck, a mixture of cornstarch in water, which appears thicker or thinner depending on how it is physically manipulated. The results are presented and interpreted taking…

Collisions are real-world situations from everyday life (such as car crashes, playing billiards, etc.) that can be described and understood by the principle of conservation of momentum. One might expect that learning from simple collisions might help students understand more complicated physical phenomena. However, from our teaching experiences we…

The recent works of oscillators are mainly focused on underdamped oscillation. Therefore, the writer proposes an experimental apparatus to demonstrate all types of damped harmonic oscillation. The apparatus utilizes an Arduino for data acquisition and an Excel spreadsheet for data analysis. By using this apparatus, the type of damped harmonic…