Our organic alarm clock has now taken to jumping on the bed at about 5 in the morning and purring very loudly in an attempt to persuade us it’s breakfast time. It’s not surprising, since sunrise (and therefore cat-rise, if not Marcus-rise) is becoming earlier and earlier. Daylight hours are now long – in fact the […]
Continue readingIn uncertain times, its good to know there are some things that never change – such as day follows night, my compass needle always points in the same direction, and England will always underperform at the World Cup. Well, scrub the middle one, actually. In our lab, at any rate, there are some shocking variations in […]
Continue readingMy father-in-law sent me this link at the weekend. It’s to a book published in 1914 (that’s nineteen fourteen, not sixteen fourteen, or nine fourteen), describing how children of the day are being taught lies with regard to the shape and movement of the earth in the solar system. Does the Earth Rotate? No. By […]
Continue readingThis month’s feature article in PhysicsWorld is a plea by well-known science (particularly physics) writer Paul Davies to relaunch (or rather, expand) the search for extra-terrestrial life. The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been around for nearly fifty years, focusing on analyzing data from radio telescopes. But Paul Davies thinks there are other places […]
Continue readingAs we know, the earth spins on its axis once every twenty four hours. (Well, actually it doesn’t, but we’ll leave aside the difference between solar and sidereal days for the purpose of this entry). The spinning earth posses something we physicists call angular momentum. It is the ‘spinning’ version of linear momentum; the latter […]
Continue readingWhile I was on holiday, news broke (e.g. see the piece in The Guardian) about the possible detection of WIMPs. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles are what many physicists think makes up ‘dark matter’. (What is dark matter? – basically, if you analyse the way galaxies move, you discover that the amount of matter you can ‘see’ […]
Continue readingI feel that, as a physicist, I should be making some reasonable and informed comment on the Copenhagen summit. After all, climate is immensely physicsy. We have fluid flow, conduction, convection and radiation of heat, interaction of electromagnetic radiation with electrons in molecules, scattering of light by small particles, solar activity (on second thoughts, scrub […]
Continue readingNew Zealand is, hopefully, just a few days away from becoming a space-nation. The private company Rocket Lab (what a great name – I like names that describe what a business actually does) aims to put up its Atea-1 rocket from Great Mercury Island sometime around November 30th. The payload will reach an altitude of […]
Continue readingOne of my undergraduate students has been researching gravitational waves this year. Last Friday, he gave a nice presentation on the subject. Gravitational waves are one of the many examples of waves in physics. We are perhaps more used to waves on the surface of water, or waves along a guitar string, or electromagnetic waves […]
Continue readingWhat does ‘big’ mean? How big does something have to be in order to reasonably carry that adjective? The answer, of course, is ‘it depends’. For example, I am pretty tall. But after standing next to someone much taller than me on a tram last week, I realise that maybe I am not so tall after all. I […]
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