There is nothing a physicist likes better than to get one up on a chemist. In a friendly way of course. Rather like New Zealand beating Australia at some sporting event. So it is with great delight that I hear that the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to a physicist. (See commentary […]
Continue readingMonth: October 2009
Large Hadron Collider activity
Activity is really hotting up (should that be ‘cooling down’?) at CERN as the Large Hadron Collider is prepared again for proton-proton collisions, hopefully in November. Most of the beam tunnel is now at operating temperature (1.9 K), with the rest expected to be ready very soon. I would expect to see the collider hitting mainstream […]
Continue readingEverything’s relative
What does ‘big’ mean? How big does something have to be in order to reasonably carry that adjective? The answer, of course, is ‘it depends’. For example, I am pretty tall. But after standing next to someone much taller than me on a tram last week, I realise that maybe I am not so tall after all. I […]
Continue readingWho owns the moon?
What gives NASA the right to hurl projectiles at 1.5 miles per second into the surface of the moon? Interesting, definitely. Useful, perhaps. Reasonable? I’m not so sure. Did this mission go through some kind of ethics approval?
Continue readingMiscellaneous thoughts on physics research
Last year, according to the American Physical Society, there were over a hundred thousand articles published in physics journals
Continue readingApproximately speaking
Physicists are notorious for making approximations. This character trait is the subject of many jokes – for example, one rather rambling one involving a physicist advising a punter on which horse to put his money ends with the line "Oh, didn’t I tell you – my calculations assumed a spherical horse rolling through a vacuum." […]
Continue readingBrief pause
I’m having an extra llllooonnnngggg weekend, so blogging may take a back seat for a few days, but I shall be back very soon.
Continue readingTeaching research
Over the last week or so I have, amongst other things, been doing some preparation for two summer scholarship students that will be working with me from December to February. The summer scholarships are a great opportunity for undergraduate students to experience what research is like. The University of Waikato, like several other universities, offers […]
Continue reading