I’ve just put an order in for a new piece of lab equipment – an experimental set-up that will allow students to carry out the two-slit, one-photon experiment. This is one of the ‘classic’ experiments of quantum mechanics – showing just how strangly small things behave. Interference patterns are commonly observable when you have two […]
Continue readingYear: 2012
Some good news
One of the strange things about blogging is that you are carrying out a (usually) one-way conversation with unknown people. Now, I know there are several people who read this blog regularly who will comment regularly, and although I have never met many of them I feel I am ‘getting to know them’. I also […]
Continue readingPeer review bites back
There’s just one more week of ‘freedom’ before the teaching deluge starts next Monday. As many people have pointed out to me, this is really, really late in the year, and I must have enjoyed a really long summer holiday with nothing to do. I wish. Not being semester time doesn’t mean that an academic […]
Continue readingGuilty of order-of-magnitude neglect
I’ve often commented on the failure of students to apply common sense when calculating physical quantitites. For example, perhaps I ask them to calculate or estimate the pressure exerted by a car tyre on the road (with the car attached to the tyre) and they punch their figures into a calculator and get 10.4 pascals. […]
Continue readingNeutrino problem solved?
Breaking news…(ish)…Well, only a few hours old… Maybe the faster-than-light neutrinos are caused by a dodgy connection. Einstein can sleep easy again.
Continue readingFaster-than-light neutrinos again
This morning I was over in Tauranga giving a talk to the Continuing Education group (i.e. ‘older’ people) on the CERN – Gran Sasso neutrino experiment. (For those interested, you should be able to download the full paper on this work here.) My philosophy is that no piece of work is too difficult to explain […]
Continue readingUnstable weather
Unfortunately I didn’t get to the cricket last night – I wasn’t feeling well – and missed Richard Levi’s demonstration of how to hit sixes Would have been fun to see. It occurred to me at the weekend that I’ve managed to avoid the rain in the last week. While its poured down in Cambridge, […]
Continue readingHitting sixes
Tuesday evening was a very enjoyable night spent at the NZ versus Zimbabwe Twenty20 cricket at Seddon Park in Hamilton. I got to watch the New Zealand fast bowlers serve up boundary-fodder for the aptly-named Hamilton Masakadza and Brendan Taylor, who didn’t disappoint, wafting Mills and Bates and co over the square-leg boundary with monotonous […]
Continue readingJust WHERE is the South Pole?
Friday’s Herald, page 15. In an article on Lake Vostok, the location of this mass of water is described as "3.8 km beneath the surface, about 1300 km east of the South Pole". Go figure. Unfortunately the online version is somewhat trimmed down and misses this plainly ridiculous piece of information. Google Earth tells me it’s 77 degrees […]
Continue readingKnowing what quality looks like
I’ve been to a couple of really good seminars this week – one by Waikato’s own Noeline Wright, from the Faculty of Education, and another from John Gilbert, a Science Educator at King’s College London. Although the focus of the two talks was different, they both touched on a similar theme, namely that one of […]
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