Increasingly, the physics community is attending to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), both in language and action. We are more publicly recognizing our individual responsibilities as physicists to address social injustice and systemic oppression. To this end, our physics classrooms are key levers for action. While we have made…

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.…

In this paper, we present the spontaneous and reasoned approaches by a Physicist (B.C.) and a Mathematician (T.B.). Section 1 is by B.C and section 2 is by T.B.

Before reading this essay, go to your kitchen and find a bottle of Italian salad dressing. Get one that has been sitting still for a while at a fixed temperature--that is, one in thermal equilibrium. You will find an oil-rich layer at the top of the bottle and a vinegar-rich layer at the bottom (see Fig. 1). But think for a moment before spreading…

For many high school students, physics is an abstract subject with complex mathematical statements explaining the world around them. The mathematics can feel intimidating and the introduction of difficult vocabulary, such as "force," "kinetic energy," or "spectroscopy," can give students the impression that physics is…

The history and philosophy of science (HPS) plays a special role in education. An elective HPS course on the philosophy of scientific experimentation for young scientists and graduate students of natural science is presented. The course bears a pragmatic character, and its main aims include the development of critical thinking (CT),…

Ask a physics person what the name of Robert A. Millikan brings to mind, and most would immediately think of the eponymous experiments that he did with the charge on the electron in the years 1908 to 1913. A few might remember his work, starting in 1914, with the experimental determination of Planck's constant using the photoelectric effect. Few…

The need for an effective communication between scientific research and society is widely known to the broadest scientific community, and the sad times we are living in make it even clearer. At the same time, the need of establishing long-term structural connections between the worlds of research and that of education and scientific communication…

Gender bias and inequity are pervasive in physics, but teachers can help. A recent Resource Letter digs into the history, current status, and classroom implications of gender and physics. However, one finding from that work was the tendency for "gender in physics" research to treat sex and gender as the same thing and to neglect the…

Surprisingly, newspapers contain wide-ranging physics topics available for narrative-style teaching in the classroom. Topics of newspaper articles we have covered over the years include physicists (obituaries of Hans Bethe, etc.), art or music that involve physics (color and standing waves), forensics (auto accidents and art forgeries), archeology…

No matter your opinion on religion, whether you are a staunch believer or an unapologetic atheist, that phrase "God's thoughts" is a delightfully poetic one. It represents in a metaphorical way nothing less than an understanding of the deepest and most fundamental laws of the universe. Specifically, the hope is that we will one day be…

Many teachers like to introduce the Bohr atom toward the end of an introductory physics course. This is an excellent idea, given the historic importance of Bohr's 1913 work, which provided the bridge from Planck's quantized interaction of matter and radiation (1900) to the full theory of quantum mechanics (1925-28). Unfortunately, the version of…

This paper presents exemplification of the ways in which teachers can garner the interest piqued by the recent detection of gravitational waves. The intention was to develop a teaching module based around this exciting new branch of astronomy and to use this as an opportunity to bring cutting-edge science into the classroom, whilst allowing…

An important aspect of science education involves helping students learn to read and communicate scientific information and arguments. In this note, I would like to share a resource that I have come across which I have found to be a useful tool for helping students improve those skills, learn content material, and acquaint them with a great…

Studies on physics identity are appearing more frequently and often responding to increased awareness of the underrepresentation of students of color in physics. In our broader research, we focus our efforts on understanding how racial identity and physics identity are negotiated throughout the experiences of Black physicists. In this paper, we…