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arXiv2023

Activity Report on the Seventh African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications (ASP2022)

The African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications, also known as the African School of Physics (ASP), was initiated in 2010, as a three-week biennial event, to offer additional training in fundamental and applied physics to African students with a minimum of three-year university education. Since its inception, ASP has grown to be much more than a school. ASP has become a series of activities and events with directed ethos towards physics as an engine for development in Africa. We report on the seven African School of Physics, ASP2022, organized at Nelson Mandela University, on November~28 to December~8, 2022. ASP2022 included programs for university students, high school teachers and high school pupils.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

AI and the FCI: Can ChatGPT Project an Understanding of Introductory Physics?

ChatGPT is a groundbreaking ``chatbot"--an AI interface built on a large language model that was trained on an enormous corpus of human text to emulate human conversation. Beyond its ability to converse in a plausible way, it has attracted attention for its ability to competently answer questions from the bar exam and from MBA coursework, and to provide useful assistance in writing computer code. These apparent abilities have prompted discussion of ChatGPT as both a threat to the integrity of higher education and conversely as a powerful teaching tool. In this work we present a preliminary analysis of how two versions of ChatGPT (ChatGPT3.5 and ChatGPT4) fare in the field of first-semester university physics, using a modified version of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) to assess whether it can give correct responses to conceptual physics questions about kinematics and Newtonian dynamics. We demonstrate that, by some measures, ChatGPT3.5 can match or exceed the median performance of a university student who has completed one semester of college physics, though its performance is notably uneven and the results are nuanced. By these same measures, we find that ChatGPT4's performance is approaching the point of being indistinguishable from that of an expert physicist when it comes to introductory mechanics topics. After the completion of our work we became aware of Ref [1], which preceded us to publication and which completes an extensive analysis of the abilities of ChatGPT3.5 in a physics class, including a different modified version of the FCI. We view this work as confirming that portion of their results, and extending the analysis to ChatGPT4, which shows rapid and notable improvement in most, but not all respects.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

Opinion | Think Physics, Think Man: Barrier's to Women's Participation in Physics Education

An analysis of barriers to women's participation in physics education is presented. It is expected that in undergraduate physics the most common situation for a women is that she is cisgender and one of a numerical minority in the classroom. The effects of other intersectional identities are not considered. The analysis is based on evidence from the author's lived experience as a transgender woman who transitioned as an undergraduate and on evidence from the literature on the effects of gender differences in academic disciplines. It is expected that the teaching philosophy and practice in physics classrooms favours men over women and these gender dynamics are partially responsible for the under-representation of women in physics. These expectations require further research to be substantiated.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

Driving action on the climate crisis through Astronomers for Planet Earth and beyond

While an astronomer's job is typically to look out from Earth, the seriousness of the climate crisis has meant a shift in many astronomers' focus. Astronomers are starting to consider how our resource requirements may contribute to this crisis and how we may better conduct our research in a more environmentally sustainable fashion. Astronomers for Planet Earth is an international organisation (more than 1,700 members from over 70 countries as of November 2022) that seeks to answer the call for sustainability to be at the heart of astronomers' practices. In this article, we review the organisation's history, summarising the proactive, collaborative efforts and research into astronomy sustainability conducted by its members. We update the state of affairs with respect to the carbon footprint of astronomy research, noting an improvement in renewable energy powering supercomputing facilities in Australia, reducing that component of our footprint by a factor of 2--3. We discuss how, despite accelerated changes made throughout the pandemic, we still must address the format of our meetings. Using recent annual meetings of the Australian and European astronomical societies as examples, we demonstrate that the more online-focussed a meeting is, the greater its attendance and the lower its emissions.

astro-ph.IM↗
arXiv2023

A scalable approach to undergraduate research in physics

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) increase students' access to research. This lesson plan describes an interdisciplinary CURE developed to be able to involve over 60 students per semester in original research using data from large particle physics experiments and telescopes, although the methods described can easily be adopted by other areas of data science. Students are divided into research teams of four, which greatly leverages the instruction time needed for mentoring, while increasing research productivity by creating accountability amongst the students. This CURE provides a strong framework, which minimizes barriers that students may perceive. This helps increase the number of students that benefit from a research opportunity while providing guidance and certainty. Through this CURE, students can engage in original research with the potential for publication-quality results, develop communication skills in various modes, and gain confidence in their performance as a scientist.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

Contributions from Pilot Projects in Quantum Technology Education as Support Action to Quantum Flagship

The GIREP community on teaching and learning quantum physics and the Education section of the Quantum flagship project of the European Union (QTEdu) have brought together different stakeholders in the field of teaching quantum physics on all levels, including outreach. The goal of QTEdu is to pave the way for the training of the future quantum workforce. To this end, it is necessary to understand the needs of the quantum technology (QT) field, make the general public aware of the existence and importance of QT, and introduce quantum physics already in high school, so that high school students can choose QT as their field of study and career. Finally, new university courses need to be established to support emerging specific profiles such as a quantum engineer. In this symposium, four QTEdu pilot projects were brought together to demonstrate how their complementary approaches have worked towards realising the above goals.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

Using math in physics: 6. Reading the physics in a graph

Learning to use math in physics involves combining (blending) our everyday experiences and the conceptual ideas of physics with symbolic mathematical representations. Graphs are one of the best ways to learn to build the blend. They are a mathematical representation that builds on visual recognition to create a bridge between words and equations. But students in introductory physics classes often see a graph as an endpoint, a task the teacher asks them to complete, rather than as a tool to help them make sense of a physical system. And most of the graph problems in traditional introductory physics texts simply ask students to extract a number from a graph. But if graphs are used appropriately, they can be a powerful tool in helping students learn to build the blend and develop their physical intuition and ability to think with math.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

Uncertainty Principles for Teaching Laboratories

Educators must make decisions about learner expectations and skills on which to focus when it comes to laboratory activities. There are various approaches but the general pattern is to encourage students to measure ordered pairs, plot a graph to establish linear dependence, and then compute the slope of the best-fit line for an eventual scientific conclusion. To assist educators when they also want to include slope uncertainty dependent upon measurement uncertainty as part of the expected analysis, we demonstrate a physical approach so that both educators and their students have a convenient roadmap to follow. A popular alternative that educators often choose is to rely solely on statistical metrics to establish the tolerance of the technique, but we argue the statistical strategy can distract students away from the true meaning of the uncertainty that is inherent in the act of making the measurements. We will carry these measurement error bars from their points of origin through the regression analysis to consistently establish the physical error bars for the slope and the intercept. We then demonstrate the technique using an introductory physics experiment with a purpose of measuring the speed of sound in air.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

Soliciting opinions and solutions on the "Q Zhang's Problem"

"Q Zhang's Problem" is a teaching problem proposed by Qian Zhang, a science teacher at Dongjiao Minxiang Primary School in Dongcheng District, Beijing. In 2022, she proposed that: (1) when explaining the knowledge points of frequency in the "Sound" unit, experiments on the vibration of objects such as rubber bands and steel rulers were used to assist students in learning, but the effect was not obvious, because it was difficult for the naked eye to distinguish the speed of vibration of objects such as rubber bands, and it was difficult to correspond to the high and low frequencies; (2) Students seem to be confused about the difference between frequency and amplitude. When guiding them to make the rubber band vibrate faster, they tend to tug harder at the rubber band, but this actually changes the amplitude rather than the frequency (changing the frequency should be to control its vibrating chord length, similar to the tuning method of a stringed instrument). Therefore, demonstration experiments using objects such as rubber bands as frequencies do not seem suitable and cannot effectively assist students in establishing the concept of frequency. We hope to solicit opinions and solutions (research ideas) on this problem, with a focus on two points: (1) the mathematical/physical explanation of the problem. That is, does simply changing the amplitude really not affect the original vibration frequency of the object (except when the amplitude is 0) (2) explanation from a cognitive perspective: Why do people confuse the two concepts? What is the cognitive mechanism behind it.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

The African Biophysics Landscape: A Provisional Status Report

This is a provisional status report of biophysics activities in Africa. We start by highlighting the importance of biophysics research and development for every country's economy in the 21st century. Yet, the amount of biophysics activity in African countries varies between woefully little to nothing at all. We present a scope of biophysics research on the continent based on a pilot scientometrics study. We discuss a number of existing multinational programmes and infrastructure initiatives and propose a Pan African Professional Society for Biophysics. We emphasize the need for education, infrastructure and career development, and conclude with a list of suggested recommendations for expedited development of biophysics research on the continent.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

The spinorial ball: a macroscopic object of spin-1/2

Historically, the observation of half-spin particles was one of the most surprising features of quantum mechanics. They are often described as "objects that do not come back to their initial state after one turn but do after two turns". There are macroscopic implementations using constraints such as clamping a belt or ribbon that purport to show similar behavior (the "Dirac belt trick"). However, a demonstration of an unconstrained macroscopic object with half-spin behavior remains elusive. In this article, we propose to fill this gap and introduce the spinorial ball. It consists of a translucent plastic ball with internal LED illumination that behaves as a freely movable macroscopic half-spin object. It provides a new tool to introduce and visualize half-integer spins as well as the covering group homomorphism from SU(2) to SO(3), and offers in particular a clear visualization of the different homotopy classes of SO(3). We discuss its development and function, and how one can mimic quantum measurement and wave function collapse using this the spinorial ball. The entire system is open source hardware, with build details, models, 3d printing files, etc., provided under an open source license.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

Experimenting with RC and RL series circuits using smartphones as signal generators and oscilloscopes

Simple, portable and low-cost experiments as RC and RL series circuits are proposed to experiment with DC circuits. Very common elements are used: a few electronics components (resistors, capacitors, coils and connecting wires) and two smartphones. We consider the charging and discharging of a capacitor in the RC circuit and also that of coil in the RL circuit. Using a smartphone as an oscilloscope we observe voltages variations which are the transient response to a square signal generated in the second smartphone. These voltage variations are directly related to the electrostatic or magnetic energy stored in the circuits. The experimental data have been collected with the smartphone used as an oscilloscope and corroborated with theoretical predictions based on Kirchhoff's laws. The comparison showed differences of the order of the 1\% or less between the calculated capacitance or inductance compared to the manufacturer values. This approach which avoids the use of expensive signal generators, oscilloscopes, or any specialized hardware can be performed in less-favored contexts and even as a home assignment.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

Advances in apparent conceptual physics reasoning in GPT-4

ChatGPT is built on a large language model trained on an enormous corpus of human text to emulate human conversation. Despite lacking any explicit programming regarding the laws of physics, recent work has demonstrated that GPT-3.5 could pass an introductory physics course at some nominal level and register something close to a minimal understanding of Newtonian Mechanics on the Force Concept Inventory. This work replicates those results and also demonstrates that the latest version, GPT-4, has reached a much higher mark in the latter context. Indeed, its responses come quite close to perfectly demonstrating expert-level competence, with a few very notable exceptions and limitations. We briefly comment on the implications of this for the future of physics education and pedagogy.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

Matrix diagonalization and singular value decomposition: Static SageMath and dynamic ChatGPT juxtaposed

We investigated some difficulties that students often face when studying linear algebra at the undergraduate level, and identified some common mistakes and difficulties they often encountered when dealing with topics that require algorithmic thinking skills such as matrix factorization. In particular, we focused on (orthogonal) diagonalization and singular value decomposition (SVD). We also offered the possibility of exploring these topics using SageMath, a Python-based free open software computer algebra system (CAS) that has been identified to be useful for assisting many students in the computational process even though its output is static by nature. We then explored dynamic ChatGPT by inquiring the chatbot about the topic, either by asking to provide an example or to solve a problem, that is by constructing an (orthogonal) diagonalization or SVD from a particular matrix. By consolidating essential concepts in linear algebra and improving computational skills through effective practice, mastering these topics would become easier and mistakes could be minimized. Static SageMath, in particular, is a great aid for calculation confirmation and handling tedious computations. Although dynamic ChatGPT is relatively unreliable for solving problems in linear algebra, the mistakes it produces could become a valuable tool for improving critical thinking skills.

math.HO↗
arXiv2023

Listen! A smartphone inquiry on the domino effect

In this work, we investigate the phenomenon of a chain of falling dominoes ("domino effect") by an acoustical measurement with a smartphone. Specifically, we will present an approximate model valid for a considerable range of realistic parameters of the domino effect; a new, easy and low-cost experimental method using acoustical data captured by smartphones; and a comparison of these experimental data to the simplified treatment and to other, more comprehensive theories. The results of the experiments show good agreement with other measurements and theory, both advanced ones from the literature, and our own simplified treatment: qualitatively the approach to a constant propagation velocity of the domino front after a small number of toppled dominoes as predicted by theory; quantitatively the numerical value of the asymptotic propagation velocity. The example can be seen as a demonstration of the use of mobile devices as experimental tools for student projects about a phenomenon of "everyday physics", and in the same time of interest for current research (the domino effect as a paradigm of collective dynamics with applications e.g. in neuronal signal transduction.

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2023

Understanding the Origin of Global Warming -- How to construct the link between CO$_2$ emissions and the average temperature of the Earth?

In this work, we propose an approach to teaching global warming adapted to the new high school curricula. The aim is to build a link between CO$_2$ emissions and the rise in the Earth's average temperature, based as far as possible on explicit empirical evidence. We first present the existing teaching approaches on the subject, which are then related to the a prioir students' ideas, in particular: the non-evidence of interactions between gases and radiation. The didactic choices structuring the approach are then exposed. They are based on the interpretation of experiments carried out with an infrared camera in a spectral range allowing the emission and absorption of CO$_2$ to be seen.

physics.ed-ph↗