Let me take you back a few years, to when I was in year 9 at school, in the fair county of Sussex (in UK). In my biology class we did an experiment to look at the preference for woodlice for light or dark. Basically two petri dishes, one painted back, with lids, joined together […]
Continue readingMonth: May 2009
NZ Scholarships – hot exam tip number 2
For you final year school students contemplating doing the scholarship physics exam, you should check out the examiners’ report on last year’s exam which has just been released on the NZQA website. (Scroll down to ‘physics’ and then download the 2008 files). It gives a summary of the skills successful and unsuccessful candidates possessed. Even […]
Continue readingWhat’s in a name?
Last Monday I gave another talk on the Large Hadron Collider, this time in Tauranga. It led to the usual kind of questions (like what is a Higgs Boson?, how fast are these protons going?, how can they be 100% sure it is safe, etc), plus a few less obvious ones, like could they use […]
Continue readingHuygens’ Clocks
I was reminded this week about the story of Huygens’ clocks. Christaan Huygens was one of those too-clever-by-half physicists / mathematicians who was into just about any science that was going on at the time. This seventeenth century dutchman is maybe best known in physics for his work on wave motion, but he was also […]
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