I’m often asked what the difference is between science and engineering. Or, put another way, why did I find working in a ‘School of Engineering’ when I’m a physicist (i.e. a scientist) so difficult sometimes? (I now work in ‘Te Aka Matuatua – School of Science‘ at the University of Waikato.) The two disciplines blur […]
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I had the delight of being at Seddon Park on Friday 4 December, watching Kane Williamson on his way to 251 runs. It was a wonderful innings to watch and he’s a perfect example to try to copy if you’re learning to play the game. Part of his success is down to his ability to […]
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Last week child number 1 managed to put a hole in a plasterboard (‘gib’) wall. I wasn’t in the room at the time, but I believe it had something to do starting at one end of the house, running down the corridor, through the bedroom doorway, doing a forward flip onto the bed and sliding […]
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What irks me most about Tourism Minister Stuart Nash’s comments about a new NZ tourism strategy this morning? Is it: The complete disregard he has for the millions of New Zealanders who would love to take a New Zealand holiday but can’t because they are crippled by high housing costs His desire to increase carbon […]
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The pandemic has certainly been a trigger for some really interesting science to be done. Here’s something that’s hit the headlines today – Artificial Intelligence can be used to detect COVID-19 from the sound of someone’s cough. If you want to read it, the full report is here, but unless you’re lucky enough to subscribe […]
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It’s that time of year when school students become seriously focused on exams. This year has been messy for student learning, and has affected some students more than others, but the NCEA external assessments and the Scholarship exams are going ahead pretty-much as normal. I’ve taken some interest in the Scholarship Physics exams over the […]
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Last week I was asked by some school students about the nature of gravity. What is it? Isaac Newton, and a whole pile of textbooks following him, treat gravity as an attractive force between two objects. It’s a force that is proportional to the product of the masses of the two objects, and is inversely […]
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Yesterday afternoon I had to call on my car’s anti-lock braking system (ABS). For reasons best known to its driver, a car pulled out of a side road right in front of me while I was driving home after work, and I needed to stop in a hurry. I rather think the car behind me […]
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In August 1999, I had the opportunity to travel from the U.K. to Varna, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea coast, to view the European Total Solar Eclipse. Just why we ended up in Varna, as opposed to a plethora of other possibilities in Europe, is a bit of a long story, but a substantial part […]
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One of the top challenges for physics in the modern era, along with Climate Change and explaining Dark Energy, has to be fixing the problem of bad light*. (I’m talking cricket – what else?) It’s a quintessentially English problem. It’s not raining, the pitch is perfectly playable, the spectators (COVID-19 notwithstanding) are enjoying themselves, but […]
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