Conceptual understanding of quantum physics across varying levels of expertise
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conceptual understanding in quantum physics acts as a bridge between the abstract mathematical framework and the physical reality it describes, fostering intuition, guiding research, and enabling communication.Although, accurately pinpointing or describing an individual's conceptual understanding is challenging, language, imagery, and gestures could offer a proxy, as is suggested by Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT).A core idea in CMT is that we understand abstract concepts by relating them to concrete physical experiences or familiar knowledge via metaphors, images, or actions.Adopting a CMT perspective, this poster explores how individuals, across varying levels of expertise, express a conceptual understanding of quantum physics.Through classroom observations, focus groups, and interviews with expert-physicists, physics teachers, and students, recurring metaphorical mappings within the field of quantum physics were identified.The findings revealed increasingly interconnected metaphorical structures with greater expertise: experts demonstrated richer, integrated networks of metaphors, while novices showed fragmented and less developed conceptualizations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".