Being Easter, blogging may take a back seat for a few days. Be assured that like governer Schwarzernegger, I’ll be back.
Continue readingYear: 2009
Luck or good judgment?
No, this isn’t about Chris Martin’s batting performance at the Basin Reserve. A couple of weeks ago, I thought I might have discovered a new phenomenon in biophysics. I won’t bore you with the details, but it concerned the behaviour of neurons (brain cells) under external stimulus. Now, I could have rushed out and tried […]
Continue readingThe gravity satellite
No time to make an intelligible comment just now, but this BBC report describing the new ‘gravity satellite’ looks a good read.
Continue readingAm I just a skeptic, or what?
(Yes, this entry is about physics, but it takes a little while to get there, so please bear with me…) Last night I attended a talk on nutrition. It was focused towards a particular health issue, but was also reasonably general in places. Now, I emphasize that I am a physicist not a nutritionist, so […]
Continue readingGoodbye summertime
So daylight savings is over for another year. Back to boring old standard time. Now’s a good moment to comment on what time zone New Zealand sits in. In ‘winter time’ it sits twelve hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, GMT (or Univeral Time, as astronomers like to call it). Is that reasonable? In Greenwich (south-east […]
Continue readingMoney, money, money
I’ve just been reading in ‘Physics World’ magazine (IOP publishing, physicsworld.com) of one of the less well-known side effects of the delay on the Large Hadron Collider: many PhD students, who hoped by now to have that final bit of data to conclude their PhD theses, are stuck. A PhD is a research degree – […]
Continue readingA sun in your own living room
The holy grail of power generation is nuclear fusion. That’s the process by which stars are powered – simply put, hydrogen turns into helium and releases energy in the process. What makes it so perfect is that there is pretty-well a limitless supply of hydrogen on the Earth, tied up in the copious quantities of […]
Continue readingOff-the-wall thought
My last comment on powering transport has prompted these thoughts: Will Google Earth one day become so packed full of data that you can ‘visit’ somewhere from your own living room and get 99% of the experience – thus doing away with expensive plane trips to exotic destinations? But will the demands on your computer system […]
Continue readingHere come the advertisers again
Buried in my junk mail this weekend was a catalogue containing all those gadgets that might come in handy once in a lifetime – you know the sort – solar powered tea strainers and personalised tin-openers – that kind of thing (I must get some to give out as Christmas presents…) One was a water-powered calculator. I haven’t seen […]
Continue readingThe unsolvable problem
In the last few days I’ve been wrestling with one of the unsolvable problems of physics, namely that it is impossible to measure something without changing it. Here’s an example. Suppose I want to measure the temperature of a pot of warm water. I can do it by putting a thermometer in it. Now, since […]
Continue reading