Scholarship Physics

It’s that time of year when school students become seriously focused on exams. This year has been messy for student learning, and has affected some students more than others, but the NCEA external assessments and the Scholarship exams are going ahead pretty-much as normal. I’ve taken some interest in the Scholarship Physics exams over the […]

Continue reading

When you are your own opposite

I was reading in a physics magazine earlier in the week about the nature of neutrinos. These are extremely numerous elementary particles, but only interact very weakly with anything.  Around a million billion pass through you each second, almost all originating from our sun, but few of them are likely to interact with you enroute. […]

Continue reading

Alice the camel

As we drove on a family outing at the weekend, we sung “Alice the camel”.   For those who don’t know it, it goes like this (to the tune of “Dem Bones”): “Alice the camel had five humps; Alice the camel had five humps; Alice the camel had five humps; so go, Alice go! Alice the […]

Continue reading

Weighing magnetic properties

It's a New Year and there are lots of things to do at work before the students get back in any numbers. There are still summer students and research students here, and in the last couple of days I've been working with a summer student on getting a new piece of equipment running for our […]

Continue reading

Lenz’s law – at 3 tesla

When I was at school, and introduced to magnetic fields in a quantitative sense (that is, with a strength attached to it), I remember being told that the S.I. unit of magnetic flux density (B-field) is the tesla, and that 1 tesla is an extremely high B-field indeed. Ha! Not any more. Last Friday night […]

Continue reading

Managing ignition timing

I've just been at a great lecture by Peter Leijen as part of our schools-focused Osborne Physics and Engineering Day.   He's an ex-student of ours, who did electronic engineering here at Waikato – and graduated just a couple of years ago.  He now works in the automotive electronics industry. That's an incredibly quickly growing […]

Continue reading

Seeing in the dark

No, nothing to do with carrots and vitamin A I'm afraid.  With dark evenings and mornings with us now :(, Benjamin's become interested in the dark. It's dark after he's finished tea, and he likes to be taken outside to see the dark, the moon, and stars, before his bath. "See dark" has become a […]

Continue reading