I wish you all a very Happy Christmas – PhysicsStop will be back in the New Year.
Continue readingYear: 2010
Apology
With regard to the last post, I’d like to clarfiy why I have used the word ‘girl’ not ‘woman’ in the title. Many of you have pointed this out to me. My thought when I began to write this short post was that I was addressing it to girls at school, who were thinking about whether […]
Continue readingSomething to ponder if you’re a girl interested in science
[20 December 2010 – Please read the comment about the title here] I just throw up the following factoids from the Australian Institute of Physics congress. Maybe together they mean something. Let me know… 1. Not many women do physics at university. (That wasn’t from the congress – every physicist knows it) 2. Female students do […]
Continue readingHot, heat, temperature and thermodynamics confusion
Consider the following perfectly reasonable sentences: "It’s hot outside" "The oven is heating up" "Insulation helps keep a house warm" Here we have physics words and concepts being used in everyday English in ways that are rather loose from a physics point of view. Does the conventional English use of words such as ‘heat’, ‘temperature’, ‘insulate’, […]
Continue readingSome data from ATLAS at the LHC
No, the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t vanished. It might not be so prominent in the news as it was two years ago, but it is quietly colliding protons together and generating lots of useful data for analysis. Here’s a couple of bits which I gleaned in Melbourne 1. What lies inside a quark (if anything?). […]
Continue readingExperimenting
One of my talks last week concerned a piece of work I’d done with my second year experimental physics class this year. Before going to Melbourne, I gave the talk a trial run at the University of Waikato’s ‘celebrating teaching’ day. It provoked a few comments then, and a few more in Melbourne, so I […]
Continue readingClimate change and conferences
Back on-line now after a week in Melbourne at the Australian Institute of Physics conference. I have lots of good stuff to blog about, including optomechanics (using light to cause vibrations), physics education (lots on this), the Large Hadron Collider and complicated models of things that might not even exist, but I’ll do this one on climate […]
Continue readingReal Science in easy chunks
Last week I took part in a ‘Science Sampler Day’, at Ruakura in Hamilton. The idea behind this was to take some really good year 9 school children, and give them a day exposed to some real science. This was run by another Hamilton-based scientist Liz Carpenter, and I thought was a great success. Throughout […]
Continue readingEarth currents
Five hundred and seventeen for one. That’s more like it. Looking forward to more of the same in Adelaide. So, physics. Last week I was doing a bit of work in the lab with a student, trying to track down why his instrumentation wasn’t working. We’re still at it; what he’s trying to do is quite […]
Continue readingAnalogue Computing
What a dismal and predictable start to the Ashes. Turn your back on the computer screen for five minutes and suddenly England have lost three wickets. Anyway, yesterday I was in Auckland, talking about research progress with a group that we’ve had strong links with in the past. (By ‘we’ I mean the Waikato cortical modelling group). One […]
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