Dawn of Science

The European voyages and the explorations of the sea and the distant lands laid the ground for the Copernican Revolution.     

Dawn of science

The invention of logarithms saved much time and effort in astronomical and mathematical calculations. Until the advent of electronic calculating machines, they remained the most effective tool for scientists.     

Dawn of science

Slowly, through philosophic blunders and religious dogmas, to free-thinking.     

Dawn of science

The practical necessity for developing steam power came from the rapid deforestation in England in the seventeenth century.     

Snippets of physics

The Coulomb problem, which corresponds to motion in a potential that varies as r ⁻¹, has a peculiar symmetry which leads to a phenomenon known as ‘accidental’ degeneracy. This curious feature exists both in the classical and quantum domain and is best understood by studying a more general potential and obtaining the Coulomb problem as a limiting case.     

Snippets of physics

Few processes in nature are as ubiquitous as the random walk which combines extraordinary simplicity of concept with considerable complexity in the final output. In this and the next installment, we shall examine several features of this remarkable phenomenon.     

Student plagiarism and faculty responsibility in undergraduate engineering labs

In undergraduate engineering labs, lab reports are routinely copied. By ignoring this form of plagiarism, teaching assistants and lab technicians neglect their role responsibility. By designing courses that facilitate it, however inadvertently, professors neglect their causal responsibility. Using the case of one university, we show via interviews and observation that such routine copying and faculty negligence are rampant. We suggest the latter be explicitly recognized as a cause of student dishonesty, and argue that it must be rectified before faculty earn the right to reform students. We also suggest that these findings are representative of, and therefore generalizable to, many universities’ undergraduate engineering and science labs.     

Snippets of physics

The gravitational field of a massive, spherical, body like the Sun is described in general relativity by a solution to Einstein’s equations called the Schwarzschild soution. Here is an elementary persepective on this solution, which — though far from a rigourous derivation — raises intriguing questions. T Padmanabhan works at IUCAA, Pune and is interested in all areas of theoretical physics, especially those which have something to do with gravity. This is based on an article originally published by the author in Physics Education, Vol. 23, No.1, p.47, 2006.