Are you a realist or a relativist?

A colleague of mine in the Faculty of Education here at Waikato has drawn my attention to an elegantly titled paper by Andreas Quale: "On the Role of Mathematics in Physics"  Science and Education (2011), 20:359-372, for those of you who like references. The paper is about the way mathematics relates to physics, highlighting the […]

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A physicist’s lament

Yesterday I visited Auckland to interview a few people who work with physics in their industry-based jobs. This was part of my small research project on the role of maths within physics, which I’ve talked about earlier. One of the people I interviewed gave some really fascinating responses, perhaps in part because he had grown […]

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Quantum Chicken

Our neighbours have a dog – one of those small, yappy, pointless pooches with an excessive bark-to-weight ratio. It runs about their garden, keeping our cat out and gets very loud when I venture over to the compost bin. The neighbours’ garden is fortunately well-fenced, meaning the creature thankfully can’t invade our side. So, imagine […]

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Don’t try this one at home

I did an experiment last night on measuring the elastic constraint forces on light rigid bodies under extreme displacements. Or, in English, I tripped in the garden and stretched various ligaments in my right foot in ways in which they aren’t supposed to be stretched.  Ouch. I couldn’t put any weight on the foot at all […]

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Getting the facts straight

On Saturday night my wife and I went down to Te Awamutu to watch ‘Sherlock Holmes’   – there being no cinema in Cambridge 🙁   It was a moderately naff piece of film – more James Bond than Sherlock Holmes – though quite suitable for some mindless Saturday night entertainment so long as you were prepared […]

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Neurons or chickens?

Last weekend we had an expedition out to rural Waikato somewhere beyond Morrinsville (in torrential rain of course) to a chicken farm and bought a couple of young chickens. The idea is that they’ll give us an egg supply, and, if properly controlled (ha ha!) dig up the weeds, fertilize the garden etc. (Or, more […]

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Keeping it cold

One of our recent Christmas gifts was an ice-cream maker. It’s been very welcome, what with all those long hot sunny days we haven’t had. Making ice-cream is pretty straightforward. Just bung in the ingredients and stir the mixture while having it freeze. That’s what the machine does. Stirring makes sure large ice crystals don’t […]

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Back in the pool…

I was back in the open-air university swimming pool yesterday. It was raining (inevitably), not that that really makes a difference. (I’m always amazed why the pool is so empty when its raining – as if it makes a difference to how damp you get). With a nice rainstorm going overhead I got to see […]

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Mossbauer Spectroscopy

While waiting for my aged computer to boot-up on my return to work this morning, I was skimming through November’s Physics World magazine, and noted an obituary to Rudolf Mossbauer. He is best known in the physics world for observing ‘resonance absorption’ of gamma rays, and then developing the technique of Mossbauer spectroscopy. When a […]

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