This brief memoir recalls Rocco Petrone, an ante litteram “brain drain” from Lucania to the United States, then an American citizen, who played a fundamental role in completing, fifty years ago, the mission of man’s first landing on the Moon. […]
A homage to Bruno Touschek, to his personal conception of physics as a creative enterprise and to his most important contribution: ADA, the small ingenious prototype of the great colliders of today. […]
Students at their last year in high-school measure the temperature in different points of a lighted incandescent lamp bulb oriented in different directions and always find the highest temperature at the top. When asked why, their answers reveal interesting patterns of reasoning: heat goes up (without further explanation); […]
In a school experiment the fall of a loaded plastic funnel in a long transparent cylindrical vessel full of water was measured and the experimental data were analysed. Based on the analysis of the data and of the experimental conditions, a law of the turbulent resistance of the medium was looked for and formulated. […]
We enphasize here the educational reasons lying behind a reversal of the traditional approach to the introduction of work, energy, potential, and fields at high school level. The details of this approach have been fully described elsewhere. […]
This paper describes the second prize-winning entry to 1991-1992 “Prernio Bonacini” contest for high-school boys on gravitational field. The 15 year-old students measured the gravitational constant, ascertaining quantitatively the proceeding of the gravitational field. […]
Thin film interference is the basis of Time-Resolved Reflectivity (TRR), a technique used in condensed matter physics to study phase transformations. Two series of simple experiments are proposed: one employing microwaves, and the other visible and infrared laser light. By the microwave experiments we show the role played by the thickness and the refraction index of the film. […]
Ways of using multimedia web-resources on wave behaviour, with the aim of integrating lectures, experimental activities and individual study are illustrated and discussed. The focus of the paper is on the advantage of using animations and simulations as tools that facilitate the cognitive path from observing real experiments to constructing physical interpretations and as collections of virtual situations allowing lab potentialities, […]