Education articles about Astronomy helping learning Math and Physics

[pabloweigandt]

Is there any specialize articles that talk about how Astronomy can help learning Math and Physics? In particular, how observational astronomy can help in the learning process of Math and Physics.

 

[jedishrfu]

I found this article on using astronomy to teach physics:

https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.3699959

and this one on how astronomers use math in their work

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/ab...o-astronomers-use-math-in-their-jobs-beginner

 

[vanhees71]

I think using astronomy is a great way to motivate to study physics and demonstrate that one needs all of physics to understand all aspects of astronomy and not some narrow specialized part of it. Another great thing is that you can start with the astronomical point of view from the very beginning in the 1st semester: Newtonian mechanics explains Kepler's laws of the motion of the planets around the Sun. Then you need geometrical optics to understand how telescopes work and how to determine distances (paralax). To understand, why the Sun shines for billions of years you need nuclear physics and how nuclei react in fusion processes. To understand what happens when a star collapses you need hydrodynamics and thermodynamics (equation of state). For neutron stars and neutron-star mergers you need general relativity and the nuclear-matter equation of state under extreme conditions. To understand how (we think to the best of our knowledge today) the universe evolved as a whole you need special relativity as well as the theory of phase transitions, for which you need to understand the standard model of elementary particle physics. Last but not least you learn that we just understand about 5% of the energy content of the universe (matter consisting of the known particles of the standard model of high-energy particle physics). The rest is dark matter (particles not yet discovered and not described by the standard model) and dark energy (the most mysterious unknown of contemporary physics).

A great introductory book along these lines of thought is

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0134874366/?tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[malawi_glenn]

The rest is dark matter (particles not yet discovered and not described by the standard model)

a popular hypothesis