UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

Dawn Meredith, University of New Hampshire

“Mechanistic Reasoning about Liquids”

Mechanistic reasoning is one of the hallmarks of scientific thinking, but there are gaps in our students’ abilities (and even our abilities!) to reason mechanistically about liquids (both static and dynamic). However, there are conceptual resources for students to build on to allow them to think productively about static and dynamics liquids. These resources are especially important for life science students in our introductory physics course to think about how physical properties of water constrain and enable life.