There’s a lot to do while driving. Look at the road – watch the speedo (98 kmh – OK there), watch the road – look in mirrors – check fuel gauge (half – OK there) – watch road – watch that car at the intersection ahead – check temperature gauge (where it should be) – […]
Continue readingYear: 2009
The We(s)t Coast
Back online briefly – blogging is a bit tricky from campsites – not all of them have wireless broadband connections yet – particularly on the West Coast. For those non-New Zealanders, ‘West Coast’ refers to the west coast of the South Island, which I have now driven the length of. Or as much as is […]
Continue readingLHC happenings
A couple of weeks ago the Large Hadron Collider became the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, reaching a beam energy of 1.18 TeV. It also breaks the 1 TeV barrier for the first time, taking the record of the Tevatron at Fermilab, near Chicago. The equipment is gradually being ‘tuned up’ and hopefully we will see […]
Continue readingSummer holidays…
It’s summer (well, on paper anyway) which means holiday, which means blogging will certainly ease off until the new year. I’ll try to get the odd post up now and then so you don’t feel neglected, but please don’t expect three or four a week. Happy Christmas and New Year.
Continue readingClimate change
I feel that, as a physicist, I should be making some reasonable and informed comment on the Copenhagen summit. After all, climate is immensely physicsy. We have fluid flow, conduction, convection and radiation of heat, interaction of electromagnetic radiation with electrons in molecules, scattering of light by small particles, solar activity (on second thoughts, scrub […]
Continue readingSmall Transistors
How often do you get attracted to an article somewhere because of its outrageous headline, and then discover on reading the article that its headline, if not an outright lie, doesn’t quite represent what the article is actually about? This is one that got my attention earlier this week on physorg.com. The headline "Scientists build […]
Continue readingA boost to my vocabulary
I learnt a new word recently, courtesy of PhysicsWorld. Yoctosecond. That’s a period of time equal to ten to the power of minus twenty-four of a second. Or 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001 seconds. As in "I’m just popping out – I’ll only be a yoctosecond." Physicists (or anyone else for that […]
Continue readingWaves in a plasma
This post follows from a comment I had yesterday from Robert McCormick on the www.sciblogs.co.nz version of PhysicsStop. (Unfortunately the mapping of PhysicsStop onto the sciblogs website doesn’t combine the comments – so if you read my blog through The University of Waikato website you won’t have got his comment, so I attach the link below) […]
Continue readingRainbows
The sun poked out from behind the clouds on my way in to work this morning just long enough to produce a beautiful rainbow for a few seconds. Not sure when we’ll next see it. I guess most of us studied rainbows at school, but I’ll throw in a couple of physics words with this […]
Continue readingRocket Science and Spam
Well, congratulations to Rocket Lab with the launch of their Atea-1 rocket. (Watch the movie). Hopefully this will go some small way to convincing the key players in the New Zealand economy that we can and should do more (a lot more) than just agriculture and tourism. And spamming. What an unfortunate distinction for a country to hold. […]
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