This article explores public policy alternatives to the current war on terrorism. Western society's vulnerability to terrorism has been dealt with primarily by expanding the law enforcement and surveillance authority of governments at the expense of the freedoms and civil liberties of the public. This approach threatens to undermine the…

Studies exploring school students' views about science have not always distinguished between different branches of science. Here, the views of 1395 secondary school students aged 11-16 about physics and, as a science comparator, biology were determined using a closed-form questionnaire. Over the period of secondary schooling a decreasing…

This paper conveys information about a Physics laboratory experiment for students with some theoretical knowledge about oscillatory motion. Students construct a simple pendulum that behaves as an ideal one, and analyze model assumption incidence on its period. The following aspects are quantitatively analyzed: vanishing friction, small amplitude,…

Physicists have known for some time that pendulum motion is a useful analogy for other physical processes. Chemists have played with the idea from time to time but the strength of the analogy between pendulum motion and chemical processes has only received prominent published recognition since about 1980, although there are details of the analogy…

In physics teaching experimentality is an integral component in giving the starting point of knowledge formation and conceptualization. However, epistemology of experiments is not often addressed directly in the educational and pedagogical literature. This warrants an attempt to produce an acceptable reconstruction of the epistemological role of…

The crisis in physics education necessitates searching for new relevant meanings of physics knowledge. This paper advocates regarding physics as the dialogue among discipline-cultures, rather than as a cluster of disciplines to be an appropriate subject of science education. In a discipline-culture one can distinguish elements of knowledge as…

This study aims to analyse, based on common characteristics of the Nature of Science, how first year university Physics textbooks present the introduction of the concept and theories of magnetic field. It shows that despite the increasing number of studies into the Nature of Science in Science Education, Physics textbooks fail to adopt the results…

When identifying instruments that have had great influence on the history of physics, none comes to mind more quickly than the pendulum. Though first treated scientifically by Galileo in the 16th century, and in some respects nearly "dead" by the middle of the 20th century; the pendulum experienced "rebirth" by becoming an archetype of chaos. With…

The simple pendulum is a model for the linear oscillator. The usual mathematical treatment of the problem begins with a differential equation that one solves with the techniques of the differential calculus, a formal process that tends to obscure the physics. In this paper we begin with a kinematic description of the motion obtained by experiment…

The paper discusses an elementary spring model representing the motion of a magnet suspended from the ceiling at one end of a vertical spring which is held directly above a second magnet fixed on the floor. There are two cases depending upon the north-south pole orientation of the two magnets. The attraction or repelling force induced by the…

The purpose of this study was to examine middle childhood students' perceptions of the learning environment in a reform-based physics course. A lecture-style, introductory physics course was modified into an inquiry-based course designed for preservice middle childhood teachers through the collaborative efforts of faculty in the Colleges of…

In this work, the authors present a commonly used example in electrostatics that could be solved exactly in a conventional manner, yet expressed in a compact form, and simultaneously work out special cases using the method of images. Then, by plotting the potentials and electric fields obtained from these two methods, the authors demonstrate that…

To demonstrate how Newton's first law of motion applies to students' everyday lives, the author developed a learning cycle series of activities on inertia. The discrepant event at the heart of these activities is sure to elicit wide-eyed stares and puzzled looks from students, but also promote critical thinking and help bring an abstract concept…

The persistence of students' misconceptions about motion illustrates the enormous difficulty that teachers face in their attempts to overcome these with traditional physics instruction. An understanding of students' ideas about motion and ways to incorporate them into successful instructional approaches can be obtained from an analysis of…

Probably the most direct observation of the Earth's curvature is how objects appear from over the horizon when we approach them and disappear as we get further away from them. Similarly, the portion of a high object (a building or a mountain) that is visible depends on the height of the site where the observation is made. Based upon these very…