Quantum interference

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 […]

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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 […]

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Peer 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 […]

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Unstable 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, […]

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Hitting 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 […]

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Just 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 […]

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