Newtonian gravitational laws explain the motions of planets around the Sun and the motions of double stars around their center of mass. Small deviations from the predictions of these laws have given confirmation of the general relativity theory. Astrophysics, by means of the analysis of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the celestial bodies permits us to derive the surface temperature of stars, […]
This paper aims at clarifying what education in science may mean in the real context of classroom activities. In particular the meaning of education in physics will be illustrated by looking at the development of concepts and methods within a perspective of continuity in the teaching of science at the level of compulsory education, […]
At the turn of the century, a new approach to science gradually emerged. In this “information approach”, science is not a description of world in itself, but a coding of the information scientists have about the world. This approach was born inside statistical mechanics from the effort of giving a microscopic interpretation of entropy. […]
Different versions of the two slits experiment are investigated, pointing out the peculiar difficulties of its didactic presentation, and the conceptual misunderstandings that a superficial reading of the experience can lead to. […]
The idea that light produces pressure evolved through a series of adoptions and rejections, from the hypothesis of Newton to the experiment of Lebedev, depending on the theory used to describe the nature of light. This article reviews the history of this development. […]
A detailed historical analysis of the development of Einstein’s Generai Relativity from 1907, year of his first paper on gravitation, to 1915, the conclusive year of his work, shows that the turning point of the development was the transformation of the classical gravitational theory into a Riemanian theory of space-time. […]
Superfluidity and superconductivity have strong analogies to each other. Why then did over a quarter of a century passed between the discoveries of these two phenomena? […]
We received a very interesting document from historic point of view, that, if authentic, would witness for an extraordinary development of ancient Babylonian physics, never before supposed by historians of science. “Fisica nella scuola” does not take any position about document’s authenticity and only publishes its translation, […]
The European culture at the turn of the century developed a deep criticism of the concept of “natural laws”. In the meantime, the new concept of “statistical law” was found to be useful and fruitful. The paper proposes a review of the positions on this issue of the physicists and philosophers like Boltzmann, […]
The paper deals with a sort of discrepancy between the historical development of Quantum Mechanics and the way it is generally taught. Quantum Mechanics is usually presented after its fundamental postulates, while this is not easy to connect to the real historical evolution of the basic ideas. […]
Noise is unavoidable in measurements and limits their final precision. In particular, when quantization of carriers is involved, as for photons in electromagnetic fields or electrons in electric currents, a minimal noise is present: the Shot noise. Recently INRiM researchers have experimentally demonstrated how Shot noise can be beaten, […]