We investigated students’ use of Newton’s second law in mechanics and electromagnetism contexts by interviewing students in a two-semester calculusbased physics course. We observed that students’ responses are consistent with three mental models, Newtonian, Aristotelian, and a hybrid model formed with elements of the first two models. These models appeared in mechanics contexts and were transfe...

Discrete-event systems are driven by events and generate events. To describe their evolution, the dater approach associate to each event a sequence of dates, namely a dater, corresponding to the dates at which the event occurs. In this paper, we show that for a large class of discrete-event systems, the dater approach makes it possible to cast the characterization of the set of all parameters t...

We derive one- and two-dimensional models for classical electromagnetism by making use of Hadamard’s method descent. Low-dimensional is conceived as a specialization the higher-dimensional one, in which fields are uniform along additional spatial directions. This strategy yields two independent electromagnetisms coordinates four one coordinate.

Two well known theorems in 3D vector calculus are Gauss’s divergence theorem (actually valid in n dimensions), and Stokes’ theorem. We find new ones. They have interesting consequences in elementary classical electromagnetism. There is a natural way to classify possible theorems of this kind and we have found every theorem the classification admits. These theorems ought to be in the usual under...

This paper describes Meep, a popular free implementation of the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method for simulating electromagnetism. In particular, we focus on aspects of implementing a full-featured FDTD package that go beyond standard textbook descriptions of the algorithm, or ways in which Meep differs from typical FDTD implementations. These include pervasive interpolation and accur...

We first investigate the form the general relativity theory would have taken had the gravitational mass and the inertial mass of material objects been different. We then extend this analysis to electromagnetism and postulate an equivalence principle for the electromagnetic field. We argue that to each particle with a different electric charge-to-mass ratio in a gravitational and electromagnetic...