Since 1971 EEC is giving indications to the member States on the adoption of increasingly unified metric units, to which each State responded by promulgating appropriate laws. After a short history of the S.I., this article comments on the Italian laws and the public perception of the problem and gives information about the penalties and risks connected with using the improper units. […]
In the 2014/2015 school year, the Respighi Scientific High School started the “Fare Fisica: Planck 2.0” (Making Physics: Planck 2.0) project, aiming to challenge our best students thanks to the use of the laboratory. For this purpose we chose a modern physics experiment: the measurement of the Planck constant by means of the characteristic voltage – current of a LED. […]
The developments that, starting from the experiments of Oersted, produced the first enunciation of field theory are examined. Some details of the works of Faraday and his use of analogies are discussed, followed by Maxwell’s interpretations and mathematical models giving rise, […]
About one hundred physics textbooks have been examined in this article to research the answer given to a simple question of hydrostatics shown in fig. 1. The number of wrong answers turned out to be surprisingly high. […]
The concept of pressure should be easy to understand; despite that, I’ve found frequent misunderstandings in students, teachers, and books. Is this quantity related to interaction or to the state of a system? Is it a vector, or scalar (or tensor) quantity? […]
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. […]