What gives NASA the right to hurl projectiles at 1.5 miles per second into the surface of the moon? Interesting, definitely. Useful, perhaps. Reasonable? I’m not so sure. Did this mission go through some kind of ethics approval?
Continue readingPhoto from NASA Have a look at the latest pictures from the upgraded Hubble Space telescope. I particularly like this one. The universe really is a huge place. If we look carefully enough, maybe we’ll even find a solution to the All Black lineout.
Continue readingWith reference to my entry last week, here is the bit in Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World about gravity. Spot the misconception. Sophie is talking to Alberto: ‘Well, if the moon was drawn to the earth with the same foce that causes the apple to fall, one day the moon would come crashing to earth instead […]
Continue readingAnd while I’m on the subject of the moon, I shouldn’t forget the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. For the record, the first landing was before my lifetime, but some later ones were not. (Not that I remember them).
Continue readingI feel it would be inexcusable to let a total eclipse of the sun pass without comment on a physics blog. This is especially true since I am one of the lucky people who have seen a total eclipse – in my case the 1999 eclipse that scythed across Europe. There will no doubt be millions […]
Continue readingHorrible…dark…mornings…..Can’t….get….out…of…bed……. It’s close to four weeks since the winter solstice (for us Southern Hemisphere types) and it’s already noticeable that the evenings are less dark that they were a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about the mornings. This is the equation of time kicking into play again – the darkest morning […]
Continue readingIf ever you find yourself in London, I would very much recommend a visit to Greenwich. It’s a great day out – and includes attractions such as the Maritime museum, the old Naval College, and what remains of the tea clipper Cutty Sark after a recent devastating fire. But for a physicist like me, Greenwich really […]
Continue readingIt’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 readingI’ve just had an email invitation to subscribe to a journal called ‘Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics’, with a lovely note that they hope it will serve my research needs. I’m at a loss to think of how it possibly could; maybe at some conference years ago I filled in a card saying I had some […]
Continue readingI’ve just been reading this article on the BBC website about the puzzling lack of sunspots. The sun should be entering a period of high activity (equals lots of sunspots) but observations show otherwise. Maybe it’s just a bit late, or possibly our star is doing something rather different to normal. I’ll leave discussion on what […]
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