While we are talking about relativity, what about evidence for special relativity? That’s the area of physics which talks about the way things move at very high speeds (close to the speed of light). For example, we talk about things contracting as they get faster (Lorentz contraction) and time slowing down (time dilation). Neither of […]
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It’s ninety years since the 1919 total eclipse of the sun, in which Sir Arthur Eddington provided the first bit of experimental evidence for General Relativity, and shot Einstein to public prominence. What Eddington did was to measure the deflection of the light from stars as it passed close to the large mass of our […]
Continue readingHere’s a biomechanics example for rugby fans http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/womensrugby/rookie_documents/mechanics_of_scruming.doc
Continue readingI might have had a bit of a sarcastic tone in my last entry about kicking football penalties, but we shouldn’t jump to the idea that sport science isn’t proper science. After all, it’s what has given Australia three zillion more gold medals than is warranted by its population. Have a look at the Australian Institute […]
Continue readingThe global recession obviously hasn’t hit science hard enough yet. There is still money available for someone to research the optimum way to shoot a football penalty. (By which of course I mean soccer – the only real kind of football there is). According to Tim Cable, as reported in May’s PhysicsWorld, the best thing to […]
Continue readingOK , so I’ve told you why I didn’t become a biologist, but what about chemistry? That’s a pretty fun science area too. At school, I had a great chemistry teacher, and when I started university I thought there was still a small chance that I could be tempted away from physics towards chemistry as a […]
Continue readingFirst – sorry blogging has slowed down a bit in recent days – busy time at the university having to teach courses and prepare for next semesters courses and get ready for a major conference all at once. So I’ll keep this one short. The wild weather over the last couple of days has brought […]
Continue readingDoes anyone know the answer to this question? Why is it that, when you bake a cake or make a loaf of bread, the bit in the centre of the tin always rises more than the bits around the perimeter of the tin?
Continue readingI’ve just been reading an article in Physics World about a high-flying young physicist who deceived the science community for several years (including the editors of ‘Nature’ and ‘Science’), by, putting it bluntly, making up his results. After reading it I have several questions in my head. What makes someone do that? Why did it take […]
Continue readingI spent yesterday morning with a group of students studying some properties of antennas, as part of one of our courses. One of the things we did was to measure the beamwidth of a typical satellite receiver – the sort of thing you stick on the roof of your house to get all the decent […]
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