Students’ understanding of the inverse square law in electrostatics

One problem of learning Electrostatics is that students often learn from their commonsense beliefs about electric force and electric field. This study investigated students’ conceptual understanding of finding electric force, electric field, and electric potential of point charge after learning an introductory physics course. We administered the Electrostatics Conceptual Evaluation Test to four lecture-based classes in high school. The first question was a comparison of the electric force from two-point charges at two different positions and the second question was a comparison of the electric field from a point charge at two different positions. The use of the inverse square law is required to find the electric force and the electric field at various positions. It was found that many students answered incorrectly. They described that the electric force and the electric field decrease whereas the distance increases by neglecting the inverse square law. This finding can be particularly used to suggest high school teachers to develop their effective strategy to support student learning.

A new approach to the derivation of the law of universal gravitation from Kepler’s laws

Everyone knows that the inverse square law follows from Kepler’s third law. Let us prove more: the law of universal gravitation follows from Kepler’s third law.

Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly Reanalysis in Context of Inverse-Square Law Violation

We discuss a possibility that the so-called reactor antineutrino anomaly (RAA), which is a deficit of the ν¯e rates in the reactor experiments in comparison to the theoretical expectations, can at least in part be explained by applying a quantum field-theoretical approach to neutrino oscillations, which in particular predicts a small deviation from the classical inverse-square law at short (but still macroscopic) distances between the neutrino source and detector. An extensive statistical analysis of the current reactor data on the integrated ν¯e event rates vs. baseline is performed to examine this speculation. The obtained results are applied to study another long-standing puzzle—gallium neutrino anomaly (GNA), which is a missing νe flux from 37Ar and 51Cr electron-capture decays as measured by the gallium–germanium solar neutrino detectors GALLEX and SAGE.

Author productivity pattern and applicability of Lotka’s inverse square law: a bibliometric appraisal of selected LIS open access journals

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to know whether the authors’ productivity pattern of library and information science (LIS) open access journals adheres to Lotka’s inverse square law of scientific productivity. Since the law was introduced, it has been tested in various fields of knowledge, and results have varied. This study has closely followed Lotka’s inverse square law in the field of LIS open access journals to find a factual result and set a baseline for future studies on author productivity of LIS open access journals. Design/methodology/approach The publication data of selected ten LIS open access journals pertain to authorship, citations were downloaded from the Scopus database and analysed using bibliometric indicators like authorship pattern, collaborative index (CI), degree of collaboration (DC), collaborative coefficient (CC) and citation counts. This study has applied Lotka’s inverse square law to assess authors’ productivity pattern of LIS open access journals and further Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) goodness-of-fit test applied for testing of observed and expected author productivity data. Findings Inferences were drawn for the set objectives on authorship pattern, collaboration trend and authors’ productivity pattern of LIS open access journals covered in this study. The single authorship pattern is dominant in LIS open access journals covered in this study. The CI, DC and CC are found to be 1.95, 0.47 and 0.29, respectively. The expected values as per Lotka’s law (n = −2) significantly vary from the observed values as per the chi-square test and K-S goodness-of-fit test. Hence, this study does not adhere to Lotka’s inverse square law of scientific productivity. Practical implications Researchers may find an idea about the authors’ productivity patterns of LIS open access journals. This study has used the K-S goodness-of-fit test and the chi-square test to validate the authors’ productivity data. The inferences found out from this study will be a baseline for future research on author productivity of LIS open access journals. Originality/value This study is significant from the viewpoint of the growing research on open access journals in the field of LIS and to identify the authorship pattern, collaboration trend and author productivity pattern of such journals.