Wow! That was a real nailbiting finish to the first test. Well done to the New Zealand bowlers to hold their nerve as India's batsmen got close. There was some great bowling, and also some great batting at times. Maybe the difference between the teams was that New Zealand in that final innings made fewer […]
Continue readingYear: 2014
Nanotechnology, asbestos and measurement
Last week I had a very interesting and useful visit to the Measurement Standards Laboratory in Lower Hutt. I went along with my summer scholarship student to discuss the measurement of electrical properties of biological tissue. While the procedure for measuring the conductivity of a piece of solid is pretty-well established, biological tissue is soft, […]
Continue readingScholarship Physics 2013 movies now available
Just a quick post to let you know that my attempts (struggles) with the 2013 Physics Scholarship exam are now freely available for all to make use of (laugh at). You can find them on Physics Lounge, http://www.physicslounge.org/scholarship-dr-marcus-wilson/ . A big thank you to Sam Hight for laying out the videos in an easy-to-use manner. I emphasize […]
Continue readingScholarship Physics, 2013-style
Last year, Sam Hight and I made a collection of videos on tackling the 2012 Scholarship Physics exam. Well, to be precise, Sam did the videoing, editing, and distribution, and I just did the exam. The key thing, though, was that I did the exam 'live'. I was seeing the questions for the first time. […]
Continue readingWhen stationary is fast
One of the great lines on the cult BBC show 'Red Dwarf' goes (approximately, from memory) like this: Can't you go any faster, like so we're not being overtaken by stationary objects? I'm sure my youngest sister would be able to correct the wording, and tell me immediately which episode it's from, who says it […]
Continue readingNotation notation notation
Physicists and engineers have a particular fondness for using symbols for things. Thus, the speed of light becomes 'c'. Planck's constant is 'h'. And so forth. Not content with the latin alphabet, they have commandeered the greek one too: The Stefan-Bolztmann constant is 'sigma', the permittivity of free space is epsilon0 (the greek letter epsilon […]
Continue readingGender-based subject choices
The UK's Institute of Physics has just released a report "Closing doors: exploring gender and subject choice at schools" It follows on from the report a year or so back: "It's different for girls", which looked at the way girls experienced physics. I blogged about the latter report here. The report is not long, so […]
Continue readingHow big is an atom?
I started back at work on Monday thinking that it would be a nice, peaceful day, with no-one else around on campus. Surely, on a beautiful, sunny, 6th January, the entire of Hamilton except for myself would be on the beach at Raglan. Wow, was I mistaken. The campus was buzzing with activity and there […]
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