There's been a lack of any activity from me for the last few weeks. This is mostly down to teaching overload at university. About 50% of my year's teaching comes in the first half of our first semester, which leaves me pretty-well no time to do anything else. Writing in a blog is the least […]
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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 readingTip or slide?
We had our departmental Christmas lunch on Tuesday, outside in the campus grounds. We had some lovely sunshine, but the wind did rather spoil things. I've certainly got used now to living in a very wind-free place – a fresh breeze is something quite unsual here. We were hanging on to our paper plates, but […]
Continue readingOn the track at the Avantidrome
Yesterday I finally managed to achieve one of the things on my 'to do' list that's been sitting there for about a year – attend a 'Have a Go' session at the velodrome in Cambridge. For those that don't know it, it's New Zealand's new (which means about two years old) world-class velodrome and now […]
Continue readingIs dark matter really dark?
Last week I attended a seminar by Ian Hawthorn of our Maths Department. He talked about some work which he'd done with a couple of students, Matt Ussher and William Crump. The title is a bit of a mouthful "The physics of sp(2,R)" (what does that mean?) and I have to say that I didn't […]
Continue readingAnd the Nobel Prize in physics goes to…
…the United States of America, of course. Hamish Johnston, editor of physicsworld.com, has put together a neat little piece looking at where Nobel physics laureates start and end their days. There's no surprise on the net migration front – a huge flow from everywhere to the US. You can read Hamish's piece here. What the […]
Continue readingGender stereotyping and physics
The Institute of Physics (IOP) has recently released "Opening Doors: A guide to good practice in countering gender stereotyping in schools" (You can access the report here and read some commentary at a recent IOP conference here.) Although funded jointly by the Government Equalities Office (now I'm sure such a thing didn't exist when I lived […]
Continue readingAttacked by an umbrella
We have a spring-loaded umbrella at home. The idea is that you press a button, and it automatically springs into shape – its shaft springs out and the canopy unfolds. I've often wondered about the wisdom of such a mechanism and thought what would happen if it went off in an inconvenient confined space, such […]
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