I chose to celebrate Auckland Anniversary by visiting Wellington. (Naturally enough.) No surcharges on the coffee there. It was my first visit to the capital as a tourist, and as you might expect I did some of the usual touristy things like Te Papa, Parliament, and the cable car. The cable car is a real […]
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Time to get out of the water
Water isn’t the only fluid that’s in everyday experience. Air is as well – the word can apply to either a liquid or a gas. And things moving in air can behave pretty oddly too. I think the best example is an aerofoil – that relies the fact that a fluid’s pressure reduces as it […]
Continue readingYet more swimming pool physics
Imagine, if your mind can cope with it, Michael Phelps, decked in his speedos, about to dive into a pool of golden syrup. If the thought isn’t too much for you to cope with, now ask yourself what stroke he should swim to get to the other end as quickly as possible. As explained in […]
Continue readingMore swimming pool physics
Have you ever thought why water is difficult to move through? What property does it have that air doesn’t, that makes it an effort to get anywhere in it? The answer is utterly straightforward, but it is worth saying: it is simply more dense than air. If you want to move through it, you’ve got […]
Continue readingSwimming pool physics
It’s summer, and for me that means the university’s 50 metre outdoor swimming pool is open. Lots of lunchtime lengths, dodging the morons who can’t cope with the concept that lanes are for lane swimming, rather than playing ball games. There’s a lot of physics that goes in with swimming. Hydrodynamics, the study of how […]
Continue readingThunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening
I guess we all have our own utterly irrational fears. One of mine is needles. It’s not that they hurt, because they don’t; rather it’s the concept that causes me to shudder at the prospect of a blood test. Sticking bits of metal into my body and sucking out the contents? I don’t think so. […]
Continue readingAdd one tablespoon of golden syrup…
One tablespoon? Is that all? Depends on the recipe, I guess. But does anyone know exactly how much one tablespoon actually is? The answer, which I found out at the weekend, demonstrates exactly why the world needs physicists. According to the instructions with my wife’s new breadmaker, an Australian tablespoon is different from a […]
Continue readingLevitation
Last Thursday while browsing a popular NZ-based website an article caught my attention: ‘Scientists learn to levitate objects’. Images from Harry Potter films flashed before my eyes, and I thought this had to be something worth checking out. And it was, for two reasons. First, because the article is a surprisingly accurate piece of science […]
Continue readingThe second law of thermodynamics
So now you know the first law – what’s the second law? This one is a whole lot easier to define since you don’t need to fret over what exactly energy IS, and, historically speaking, it was understood long before the first law. (It is relegated to being the second law of thermodynamics since the first […]
Continue readingThe first law of thermodynamics
I’ve used the word ‘energy’ a lot in recent posts (like yesterday’s), but haven’t really said what it is. We all have some idea of what energy means – it’s a resource you need to do something useful, such as propel a car, or play a video game, heat your house or power refigerator. (This […]
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