This paper deals with a brief introduction to major remarkable discoveries of the "soliton" and the "inverse scattering transform" in the 1960s. The discovery of the soliton (or the solitary waves) began with the famous physical experiments of the Scottish Engineer and Naval Architect John Scott Russell in the Glasgow-Edinburgh…

In this paper, we discuss a simple liquid level experiment that can be used to teach nonlinear phenomena in process control through stiction in control valves. This experiment can be used to introduce the undergraduate students to the area of Controller Performance Assessment (CPA). The experiment is very easy to set-up and demonstrate. While…

The purpose of this study was to describe the evolution of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in prospective secondary physics teachers. Craft knowledge was used as one epistemological perspective. The researcher used two cases, two prospective physics teachers, and followed their development through the science curriculum class and student…

The cooling of objects is often described by a law, attributed to Newton, which states that the temperature difference of a cooling body with respect to the surroundings decreases exponentially with time. Such behaviour has been observed for many laboratory experiments, which led to a wide acceptance of this approach. However, the heat transfer…

A magnetically controlled pendulum is used for observing free and forced oscillations, including nonlinear oscillations and chaotic motion. A data-acquisition system stores the data and displays time series of the oscillations and related phase plane plots, Poincare maps, Fourier spectra and histograms. The decay constant of the pendulum can be…

Investigation of scientists' actual processes of conducting research can provide us with more realistic aspects of scientific inquiry. This study was performed to identify three aspects of scientists' actual research: their motivations for scientific inquiry, the scientific inquiry skills they used, and the main types of results obtained from…

This article discusses some interesting physical properties of oscillatory motion of a particle on two joined inclined planes. The geometrical series demonstrates that the particle will oscillate during a finite time. Another detail is the converging path to the origin of the phase space. Due to its simplicity, this motion may be used as a…

The author presents a theory of career development drawing on nonlinear dynamics and chaos and complexity theories. Career is presented as a complex adaptive entity, a fractal of the human entity. Characteristics of complex adaptive entities, including (a) autopiesis, or self-regeneration; (b) open exchange; (c) participation in networks; (d)…

Discussion of nonlinear dynamic mechanisms focuses on whether information production and dissemination can be described by similar mechanisms. The exponential versus linear growth of literature is discussed, the time factor is considered, an example using literature from the field of superconductivity is given, and implications for information…

Arnol'd's second stability theorem is approached from an elementary point of view. First, a sufficient criterion for stability is found analytically as either -[mu][subscript 1] less than U[double prime]/U-U[subscript s] less than 0 or 0 less than U[double prime]/U-U[subscript s] in the flow, where U[subscript s] is the velocity at the inflection…

Describes an air track experiment demonstrating the transfer of mechanical energy from elastic potential to kinetic. Discusses four methods for calculating energy stored in the spring. Included are pictures, typical data, and graphs. (YP)

Photoisomerization of conjugated systems is a common pathway for photomechanical energy conversion in biological chromophores. Such reactions are mediated by conical intersections (CIs)--points of degeneracy between different potential energy surfaces, which efficiently funnel population between electronic states. There are many examples of a…

Shows that the nonlinear vector product developed by the author in a previous paper to treat successive space rotations can be employed to treat the space time rotations of special relativity in which the angle of rotation is imaginary. (HM)

Although most waves studied by students satisfy the linear equation, particle physicists have become interested in nonlinear waves--those not satisfying the superposition principle. A mechanical wave system, satisfying the sine-Gordon equation, can be constructed using a modified transverse wave system to demonstrate nonlinear wave-particle…

A demonstration to illustrate sum and difference frequencies of a nonlinear device is explained. (MDR)