Search results for "Physical law"
showing 10 items of 12 documents
Physics Principles of the Infrared Thermography and Human Thermoregulation
2016
Although it is easy to capture a thermal image with infrared thermography, it is necessary to have the basic knowledge about how it works and the physical laws relating to it, as well as the radiative characteristics of the different bodies, and how heat is transferred between space and bodies. This knowledge is essential to establishing a logical hypothesis, using the camera rigorously, and interpreting the thermal data correctly. The aim of this chapter is to present the basic physical principles of infrared thermography, heat transfer and human thermoregulation.
IWAL–An Interactive Weather Analysis Laboratory
2015
Abstract Complementary key elements of meteorological education are the provision of a thorough theoretical understanding of the physical laws governing atmospheric motions, and the hands-on investigation and visualization of specific weather systems. However, the latter task is technically challenging, because specific skills must be acquired for flexibly handling meteorological data. Some examples are superimposing satellite pictures and reanalysis fields, producing an isentropic potential vorticity (PV) map, and visualizing a vertical section across a flow feature of interest. Although learning these technical issues has its own merits, it can distract students from investigating the com…
A perspective on Gaussian processes for Earth observation
2019
Earth observation (EO) by airborne and satellite remote sensing and in-situ observations play a fundamental role in monitoring our planet. In the last decade, machine learning and Gaussian processes (GPs) in particular has attained outstanding results in the estimation of bio-geo-physical variables from the acquired images at local and global scales in a time-resolved manner. GPs provide not only accurate estimates but also principled uncertainty estimates for the predictions, can easily accommodate multimodal data coming from different sensors and from multitemporal acquisitions, allow the introduction of physical knowledge, and a formal treatment of uncertainty quantification and error pr…
Explaining Hooke’s Law : Definitional Practices in a CLIL Physics Classroom
2016
This article examines how a teacher in a Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) program engages in various definitional practices during a plenary episode in a physics class taught in English in Finland. The episode focuses on explaining Hooke’s law, which involves defining its key concepts and their relations as instructable matters. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the article shows how the teacher accomplishes definitions and definition-related actions through talk and a range of embodied and material resources. The different configurations of resources are coordinated to elucidate the key concepts, to contextualize them in relation to the larger activity, and to situate …
Physics-Aware Machine Learning For Geosciences And Remote Sensing
2021
Machine learning models alone are excellent approximators, but very often do not respect the most elementary laws of physics, like mass or energy conservation, so consistency and confidence are compromised. In this paper we describe the main challenges ahead in the field, and introduce several ways to live in the Physics and machine learning interplay: encoding differential equations from data, constraining data-driven models with physics-priors and dependence constraints, improving parameterizations, emulating physical models, and blending data-driven and process-based models. This is a collective long-term AI agenda towards developing and applying algorithms capable of discovering knowled…
Contextuality is About Identity of Random Variables
2014
Contextual situations are those in which seemingly "the same" random variable changes its identity depending on the conditions under which it is recorded. Such a change of identity is observed whenever the assumption that the variable is one and the same under different conditions leads to contradictions when one considers its joint distribution with other random variables (this is the essence of all Bell-type theorems). In our Contextuality-by-Default approach, instead of asking why or how the conditions force "one and the same" random variable to change "its" identity, any two random variables recorded under different conditions are considered different "automatically". They are never the…
Goethe's dream
2009
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined living organisms as objects with an intrinsic purpose, which are self‐organized in such a way that every part is a function of the whole and the whole is a function of every part, and in which “nothing is for nothing”. Kant already anticipated the tension between agency and structure, and between forward and backward causation. He also perceived living beings as entities that, being extremely complex, are not amenable to descriptions based on laws that are similar to the fundamental laws of physics: “There will never be a Newton of a grass blade,” he wrote. Less metaphorically, Kant believed that science would not be able to understan…
Some past and present challenges of econophysics
2016
We discuss the cultural background that was shared by some of the first econophysicists when they started to work on economic and financial problems with methods and tools of statistical physics. In particular we discuss about the role of stylized facts and statistical physical laws in economics and statistical physics respectively. As an example of the problems and potentials associated with the interaction of different communities of scholars dealing with problems observed in economic and financial systems we briefly discuss the development and the perspectives of the use of tools and concepts of networks in econophysics, economics and finance.
Land surface processes: description, theoretical approaches, and physical laws underlying their measurements
1991
For more than a decade, evidence has accumulated from climate model experiments that the exchanges of momentum, heat, and moisture at the surface are phenomena that strongly influence the dynamics and thermodynamics of the atmosphere.
The value of statistical laws in physics and social sciences
2007
The deterministic conception of nature implies in itself a real cause of weakness in the irremediable contradiction that it faces with the most certain data of our consciousness. G. SOREL attempted to compose this disagreement with the distinction between artificial nature and natural nature (this last acausal), but in this way he denied the unity of science. On the other hand, the formal analogy between the statistical laws of physics and the ones of social sciences credited the opinion that human facts also undergo a rigid determinism. It is therefore important that quantum mechanics principles have brought to recognize the statistical character of basic laws of elementary processes, in a…