The study of the electromagnetic spectrum, how light interacts with matter, and optical instruments such as lenses, mirrors, and gratings are important concepts in the Advanced Placement (AP) physics and introductory undergraduate physics and astronomy courses. The production, control, and analysis of light helps scientists to learn about the…

White light refracted by a glass edge or a prism might be split into the colors of the rainbow but, when restricted by a suitable arrangement of edges, might also yield a sequence of colors complementary to the rainbow. We studied the creation of these color fields experimentally with a setup consisting of RGB light-emitting diodes that cover all…

Calculating the duration of a motion when the applied net force on the moving body changes with time is usually a challenging task. In most cases, the only example of the duration of a motion when the acceleration is not constant presented to introductory physics students worldwide is the example of harmonic motion. A discussion with respect to…

Theory of mind is defined as the understanding that mental states predict and explain people's behaviors. It develops around the age of 4 but seems to remain deficient in people with ASD, whereas other forms of naïve understanding remain intact. This study compares children with ASD to neurotypical children on tasks measuring naïve psychology,…

The flow of air around a baseball and over the seam acts to slow the ball and to deflect it sideways. Turbulent flow can be visualized, and sideways deflection of the ball can be observed clearly if the ball is dropped in a glass fish tank and filmed with a high-speed camera. Results are presented for a baseball and also for a billiard ball with a…

In the museum wing of the Greenslade house is a clock with a two-second pendulum about one meter long. This ticks once per second, and every time it passes through dead center it completes an electrical circuit. When I came to Kenyon in 1964, this system was used to send signals to a series of telegraph relays, which ticked once per second.…

Nowadays, electronic devices (especially smartphones) are developed to use as an alternative tool for recording experimental data in physics experiments. This is because of the embedded sensors in a smartphone such as the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, camera, microphone, and speaker. These sensors were used in physics experiments, such…

Plagiarism is not an issue observed only among students; rather, it also occurs in the publications of researchers in academic journals. The current study explored how Nobel laureates, with the highest possible academic status in the world, engage in text borrowing. A list of 91 laureates in physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, and…

The AAPT/AIP Master Teacher Policy Leader Fellowship is a one-year fellowship that aims to build teachers' policy knowledge, skills, and dispositions to act as change agents in science education policy spaces. The locus of teachers' work is typically perceived as occurring in classrooms or school buildings, directly oriented toward students and…

This article breaks new ground in exploring servant leadership with two practitioners, a Montessori team leader and a physics professor. Looking at their reflections through the eyes of adult education, all three authors ascertained that the two practitioners were natural servant-leaders. As they considered what servant leadership meant for their…

The experimental investigation of Newton's law of universal gravitation requires expensive and sensitive equipment. Therefore, it is often not possible to conduct such an experiment within a typical physics class. An alternative is to investigate the universal gravitation law by using simulations. In this paper, we are presenting such an augmented…

The coefficient of restitution (COR) for a collision is usually a number between 0 and 1 depending on whether the collision is completely inelastic, or perfectly elastic or something in between. That is the usual situation for colliding spheres or a ball dropped on a horizontal surface. A different situation arises when a bat collides with a ball.…

The history of particle physics can be considered nothing less than a huge triumph for science. Over the course of a little more than a century of effort, our understanding of the world of atomic and subatomic physics went from a vague understanding of atoms, to one that is much more detailed. Early in this hundred-year-long period, we learned…

Physics courses that focus on developing and assessing student competency through the use of standards have successfully been implemented in the past. It appears to be the case that not enough practical information is available to instructors planning to engage on this modality.

We discuss an investigation of students' motivational beliefs and performance on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) in a calculus-based introductory physics course at a large public university in the U.S. We investigated how students' perception of the inclusiveness of the learning environment (including perceived recognition, perceived…