This morning I’ve been having a quick look through some documentation from The Ministry of Education on proposed changes to NCEA Level 1 Science. For those not familiar with the NZ secondary education system, a typical student would complete NCEA level 1 at the end of year 11. In this regard, it’s broadly similiar to […]
Continue readingI started back at work on Monday thinking that it would be a nice, peaceful day, with no-one else around on campus. Surely, on a beautiful, sunny, 6th January, the entire of Hamilton except for myself would be on the beach at Raglan. Wow, was I mistaken. The campus was buzzing with activity and there […]
Continue readingA few weeks ago we had a small, informal competition in the department – guess the maximum gradient on one of the roads on campus. I think the motivation for this this small stretch of hill (or what passes for a hill here in Hamilton) was going to be used as part of a dynamics […]
Continue readingCurrently, down in the depths of C-building, there’s a master’s student trying to carry out the Stern-Gerlach experiment. (and also here). This is one of the classic experiments in quantum mechanics – specifically demonstrating the quantisation of angular momentum. If you look at the text books, it’s simple enough. Pass a beam of atoms through […]
Continue readingIt was a very interesting day at the NZ Institute of Physics conference. I learned about some of the physics experiments done at the South Pole, how to trap, observe and count atoms (and that high school physics teachers who tell their students that you can’t see atoms need to update their knowledge), some results […]
Continue readingI went to a very informative seminar this morning by Peter Pott, of the Technical University, Darmstadt, Germany. He gave a very nice introduction to the world of piezoelectric devices. In short, a piezoelectric thing is something that acquires a voltage across it when it is squeezed, stretched, sheared, etc. They can be used as […]
Continue readingA quick skim of CERN’s Twitter site, www.twitter.com/cern tells me that the LHC is going to be pootling on for the next two years at 3.5 TeV per beam, before it is prepared for running at 7 TeV, starting hopefully in 2014 "…[This] gives the LHC’s experiments a good chance of finding new physics in the […]
Continue readingDNA Sequencing has been around for a while now. It’s success is down to a wonderfully unlikely collaboration between molecular biology and computer science. Basically, in simple terms (apologies to molecular biologists if I get this wrong – feel free to correct me) to sequence your genome, you take your DNA, chop it into bits, replicate […]
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No, the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t vanished. It might not be so prominent in the news as it was two years ago, but it is quietly colliding protons together and generating lots of useful data for analysis. Here’s a couple of bits which I gleaned in Melbourne 1. What lies inside a quark (if anything?). […]
Continue readingI got home from work last night to discover the decorator still hard at work, putting up the ‘feature’ wallpaper on one fairly small section of wall. He said he’d been struggling for the last hour trying to find the repeat in the pattern. It’s a dark paper, with detailed but low-contrast outlines of flowers in […]
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