Tag: astronomy

My niece, the one who was interested in reflections, is now into maths. She’s recently added the number ‘googol’ into her vocabulary. As in "Uncle Marcus, I’m going to count from one to a googol; one, two, three, four…" – though I’m not convinced she’s actually done it yet. A googol (not to be mistaken for […]

So daylight savings is over for another year. Back to boring old standard time. Now’s a good moment to comment on what time zone New Zealand sits in. In ‘winter time’ it sits twelve hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, GMT (or Univeral Time, as astronomers like to call it). Is that reasonable? In Greenwich (south-east […]

Semester has been going just over two weeks here at the University of Waikato, and I’m getting back into the swing of teaching after the summer break. One thing that struck me today, while thinking about my lectures, was how much I use analogies while teaching physics. That’s maybe not all that surprising, since physics […]

In the magazine Physics World (on-line version here), produced by the UK Institute of Physics, I recently read a neat little article about physicists visiting primary schools. The essence was that young children can ask some pretty insightful questions, but also that they can see science in a different way to adults.  For example, the writer […]

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 […]