No. I’m not talking about 6 year old boys sticking one end in their mouth and sucking. I’m talking about vacuuming-up old bits of uncooked spaghetti on the kitchen floor. So, on taking the vacuum cleaner over the kitchen floor at the weekend, I could see that there were a few broken strands of uncooked […]
Continue readingYear: 2018
More strange quantum stuff
I have talked about some of the strange quantum mechanics effects before. An example is the two-slit experiment. If we fire photons (particles of light) at a pair of slits, and then measure where they appear on the other side of the slits, we get a two-slit diffraction pattern – exactly what we’d get if […]
Continue readingRelative Velocity
Those of us who fly out of NZ reasonably frequently will have noticed how flight times differ significantly depending on whether one is travelling west to east or east to west. Take my recent flight to and from Perth, in Western Australia. The Auckland to Perth flight was timetabled to last 7 hours 25 minutes, […]
Continue readingThe problem with undergraduate textbooks…
In the last few weeks I’ve been talking with a colleague about magnetizable materials – what they do and how they are categorized. I’m talking about things such as iron – which, when you put them in a magnetic field, will magnetize. That makes the field bigger than you started with. Some materials will stay […]
Continue readingExpensoheat
We have now been in our ‘new’ house for four months. This one still does feel a little ‘new’, being only 5 years old. It even incorporates some radical features (for New Zealand): proper insulation, double glazing (though I note that the frames are still aluminium) and well engineered drainage from what otherwise would be […]
Continue readingJigsaw puzzles
Last night I completed a project that’s been going for the last three months – a 1000 piece jigsaw. This one was pretty but particularly fiendish – being a street map of Paris. There’s not a lot of variation from piece to piece – green background with white streets, with limited clues. There are river […]
Continue readingBack to the blog
Having had a rather extended half-time break from blogging I have some time to get it kicked-off again. And what better topic that the Football World Cup. (Or, as it’s referred to everywhere except New Zealand, the World Cup.) There are some great examples and analogies of physics that we can pull from this, but […]
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