The big breaking physics news is the detection of gravitational waves. These waves are distortions in space-time, caused by a large mass doing something spectacular (two colliding black holes in this case) that propagate across the universe and create tiny changes in space when they reach us. The commentary here describes what goes on. Essentially, […]
Continue readingYear: 2016
Trusting your life to your own physics calculations
Alison Campbell alerted me to the following: Physicist Andreas Wahl shoots himself with a gun underwater – and proves a point about drag force. For the record – I won't be repeating this. Physics or no physics, the guy is crazy. BUT, what I have done, is a quick post-hoc analysis from the safety of […]
Continue readingThe world’s most beautiful equation
Don't miss the BBC poll on what is the world's most beautiful equation. Are you a fan of Einstein's field equation, or does the Riemann zeta-function hold you in raptures? There's some great commentary on the twelve candidates here. How did I vote? Well, that would be telling, but the fact that my very first […]
Continue readingDon’t confuse accuracy with precision
Going back to my last post, our fancy balance proclaims that it weighs objects from 0 to 200 g with a precision of 0.001 g (that's one milligram). And it does – put an object on and the balance gives you an attractive-looking number on its prominent display reading 184.139 g, or something similar. […]
Continue readingWeighing magnetic properties
It's a New Year and there are lots of things to do at work before the students get back in any numbers. There are still summer students and research students here, and in the last couple of days I've been working with a summer student on getting a new piece of equipment running for our […]
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