On Saturday morning I held a session for school students preparing to sit the 2013 Scholarship Physics exam. My intention is to help them prepare for this. It's a tough exam, aimed at rewarding the best school students in the various subjects. I talked through the principles behind answering various types of question, e.g. 'estimate' […]
Continue readingMonth: October 2013
Hawking radiation in the lab
A highlight of the recent NZ Institute of Physics conference was the Dan Walls medal talk given by Matt Visser. Matt has been working on general relativity. That's not desparately unusual for a physicist, but Matt has been successful in working on some of the crazier aspects of relativity and getting it published – wormholes, […]
Continue readingMy car is cold
The last couple of days have seen our Engineering Design Show. This is where our 2nd/3rd/4th year Engineering students get to talk about and show off the various projects they've been working on in the last year. It's very interesting to see the range of activities going on, and there are some 'competitive events' – […]
Continue readingThe 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to….
….Well, what do you think? No surprises this year. Francois Englert and Peter Higgs have been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in physics for the theoretical 'discovery' of the Higgs mechanism. The citation, however, I find very interesting: for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass […]
Continue readingWhat is physics?
One of the many good education-focused talks at the NZ Institute of Physics conference last week was by Kerry Parker of Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu and the University of Otago. She described her own and her students' experiences of attending the International Young Physicists' Tournament. The tournament stretches students far beyond the confines […]
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