Quantitative measures of concept maps drawn by senior high-school students are shown to be useful in assessing the understanding of relationships between the concepts required for multistep problem solving. […]
In the 17th century De Dominis, Galilei and Newton proposed three different theories on the tides. Eventually Newton’s theory, some aspects of which recall the other two, was adopted. This paper proposes a school activity in which the three theories are compared. […]
In the study of Mechanics, both at secondary school and university levels, the conceptual distinction between inertial and gravitational mass is often hurriedly discussed with the aim of unifying the two quantities as soon as possible. Fundamental contributions to the clarification of the distinction between the two quantities and to increasing the accuracy of the experiments to check their proportionality were given by great physicists as Newton and Einstein, […]
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. […]
This article describes the use of nuclear medicine techniques in diagnosis and therapy. The process of generating radiopharmaceuticals is introduced and relevant interactions of radiation with matter are discussed. Instrumentation in diagnostic nuclear medicine is described and future trends in nuclear medicine imaging technology are predicted. […]
Soap bubbles and soap films are interesting and amusing. This article describes an experiment on soap films which can be used at secondary school level that involves forming a film with the shape of a deformed quadrilateral in an area bounded by two rigid straws and two pieces of thread of equal length attached to their ends (Fig. […]
The paper deals with the wonderful fractal structure of a kind of cauliflower (Brassica Oleracea Botrytis Cimosa). The fractal dimension of the vegetable is empirically detected by measurement and a simple mathematical model of the fractal cauliflower is then built which agrees with the experimental data. […]
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, […]