On Wednesday August 18th 2021 Dr Matthew Booth and myself attended a short IOP Higher Education Group Meeting on “What is Meaningful Assessment in Physics?” which was a satellite meeting of the larger education conference ViCEPHEC21 .

The meeting was very exciting, with discussions ranging from the role of timed examinations and avoiding collusion in a time of Covid, to the clarity of assessments and novel ways of engaging students.

We were given the opportunity to present our ideas about assessment writing strategies to bypass misconceptions.

In short, misconceptions are usually defined as deeply rooted beliefs which contradict expected ‘scientific facts’ in a learning or assessment environment (if you would like to ‘diagnose’ yourself there is a website for it from the IOP). For 30 years the strategy has been to identify these beliefs and try to replace them with ‘correct ones’.

For better or worse this strategy does not…

If the title of this blog post seems dramatic, that’s probably because it is intended to mimic a newspaper headline, pun included (although the subject is not exactly breaking news). According to the Oxford dictionary the word chaos characterises a “state of complete disorder or confusion”, which is precisely the situation in which physicists and mathematicians found themselves towards the end of the 19th century and, to add insult to injury, re-experienced much later in the 1970s. What we now know as chaos theory in physics and mathematics was what emerged from this chaos.

First contact

Briefly, there was a grand idea — inherited from Descartes and Newton —  that if one  specifies the state of a system (in some technical sense), then both the future and the past of that system are knowable through a diligent application of the laws of mechanics. In short, knowing the present plus…

Our last public lecture of the 2016/17 season was a special experiment: a duo talk given by Dr Anna Marie Roos from the School of History & Heritage and Dr Fabien Paillusson from the School of Mathematics and Physics.  The sciences and the humanities met as Drs Paillluson and Roos each gave a short lecture about The Newtonian Moment, their presentation held in the new Sir Isaac Newton Building on the University of Lincoln’s Brayford Pool Campus. Their talk, which melded history, philosophy, and science and featured digital animations, attracted an audience of about 200 people, the largest so far in our lecture series. A successful experiment, this event was a wonderful way to honour our most famous Lincolnshire scientist and to celebrate the University of Lincoln’s commitment to scientific enterprise and innovation.

Before the lecture start: introduction by Prof Andrei Zvelindovsky

Answering questions from the audience after the lecture: Dr Anna Marie…

I am fond of any piece of writing involving discussions on thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and entropy. I have only recently discovered the work of Arieh Ben-Naim and decided to start delving into his approach on these subjects with one of his latest books “Entropy and the Second Law, interpretation and misss-interpretationsss” published in 2012 by World Scientific.

To summarise my experience: I had really joyful moments while reading some ways of presenting the material that I had never seen anywhere else but which were unfortunately mixed-up with more confusing (for me at least) passages where I would either not understand the “pedagogy” or simply disagree with the point of view emphasised by the author.

There are 5 chapters in the book and I shall comment on them separately as their aims and content are somewhat different.

Chapter 1

This chapter introduces the concept of entropy, first macroscopically via Clausius’ formulation…