Cornell Institute for Sensory Explorations in Physics is committed to the idea that the human mind can and does understand physics in ways that aren’t necessarily made explicit symbolically. Just as with artificial intelligence, how an agent knows or understands something is often hidden from view. A child can catch a ball, walk, ride a bicycle, or ice skate, all without being able to communicate the relevant kinematics. Misalignments between mental models and the physical world are realigned through continuous exposure to new phenomena.

Along with increasing a student’s ability to communicate and manipulate physics through language, mathematics, graphs, video, and simulations, we must also ensure that the mind is building a rich and thourough database of authentic non-idealized experiences. Most traditional physics courses are doing a wonderful job with the first part, but there is a growing deficit in student exposure to direct-sensory input from physics experiences in real three-dimensional space.

CISEP works to counteract the inbalance between representational physics–how physics is expressed, understood, communicated, and manipulated symbolically, and physics intuition–how physics is felt and navigated through human experience. We do this by providing a dedicated workshop space intended specifically for student-driven experimentation and exploration of physics phenomena.