The illuminating analemma

The what?  No, the analemma isn’t some strange pet that Hagrid keeps well-chained in his hut, rather it’s something that many of us are familiar with, especially if you, like me, have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. It’s nearly two months since the longest day (21 December), but you may have noticed […]

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Space-Junk

You may have seen a snippet in the papers and on the internet a few days ago about two satellites having a mid-air (should that be mid-vacuum?) collision. What is surprising is that this doesn’t happen more often.  As Edwin Cartlidge reported recently, it is only 51 years since Sputnik was launched, and in that […]

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Kitchen Physics

The Baked Alaska is an experiment that is certainly worth doing at home. The idea is that you place a block of icecream on a sponge base, and then smother it in meringue (for those who have only ever bought a pavlova, that means well beaten (stiff) egg white, with sugar folded in, about 50 grammes […]

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B.B.Q. Salmonella

With summer comes the barbeque. And with the barbeque, all too often, comes food poisoning. As far as I can see there are two reasons for this: 1. Barbeques are almost always cooked by men.  This is a phenomenon that surely needs study by sociologists. At the first glimpse of summer, the man, who hasn’t […]

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Why Einstein?

Following from my brief comment last time about 2005 being Einstein year, I wonder if you, like me, have ever thought why it is that Einstein is so famous. I mean, just about everyone you will meet on the street will recognise a photo of Albert Einstein, but how many would recognise (say) Charles Darwin […]

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Who’s the greatest?

I’ve recently been asked to participate in a ‘cafe scientifique’ event looking at the relative achievements of Darwin and Galileo. For those who don’t know, 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th of the publication of ‘Origin of the Species’ (how very thoughtful it was of him to arrange that both […]

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More on road physics

Following on from the last entry, another example of symmetry breaking on the roads is the stop-start kind of traffic jam that forms in heavy traffic on a motorway. When sitting in a traffic jam caused by ‘sheer weight of traffic’ (affectionately known as SWOT to traffic-analysts) you might, like me, have been inclinded to think […]

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Corrugated roads

I spent the weekend (plus a couple of other days) at Lake Waikaremoana, enjoying the bush and the scorching sunshine (yes, evern in Te Urewera). There’s not a lot of physics that goes on there; maybe that’s why it is so relaxing, with the science focussed towards earth-science (I hope that rock doesn’t fall on us) […]

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Attractive scenery

This story might be apocryphal; I haven’t been able to verify it, but it is certainly plausible. Mount Egmont National Park forms almost a perfect circle around Mount Taranaki. Given its status, its bush remains intact, unlike the rest of Taranaki. You get a great view of this dark green circle with a mountain poking […]

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