I’ve mentioned before the way that it is tempting to put your faith in the output of a computer program, particularly if it involves impressive graphics and displays words that you don’t understand. But this phenomenon doesn’t apply just to computers. I’ve been seeing it in my students’ lab work too – where an instrument […]
Continue readingTag: experiment
Engine oil and lubrication
We have a couple of cars that are beginning to age, and with that do things like breakdown occasionally and go through oil. That an engine can survive 200 000 km quite happily is to a large extent down to the lubrication. Just a few quick calculations can give the scale of the problem the […]
Continue readingFluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field
In 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 readingHands on science
Yesterday we had a one-day symposium here at the University on ‘Science in the Public’ – we brought together nearly 30 people from across the country (OK – across the North Island to be precise), all of who were involved in science communication in some manner. It was a fascinating day as we learned about […]
Continue readingPatience in experimenting
I’ve spend most of today in our new teaching lab, grappling with a piece of experimental equipment. Over the break between our A and B semesters (i.e. now) we’re moving our 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate physics lab out of one room and into another. It’s a small part of a large plan to use […]
Continue readingIt never works when you need it to
A couple of weeks ago my wife mistook an old glass jug of ours for a pyrex one and poured boiling water in it. The result was quite pretty, with a jigsaw of cracks across the jug rendering it incapable of holding any fluid ever again, boiling or otherwise. That’s thermal expansion for you. Glass […]
Continue readingLots of flashing LEDs
A sure-fire way to increase the value of any piece of electronic equipment is to add some superfluous flashing red, yellow and green LEDs to it. (Light Emitting Diode.) They serve no use, but their presence is somehow comforting (especially in sci-fi films) and gives the impression that the equipment is busy doing something useful. There […]
Continue readingWhy you need to proof read
I’ve just supervised a test for a group of second year students. On looking at their answers afterwards, it was rapidly clear that there was a problem with one of the questions. Specifically, I had given the value of Boltzmann’s constant as 1.38 times 10 to the power 23 Joules per Kelvin, instead of 1.38 […]
Continue readingAlison’s recent bioblog entry made interesting reading/listening for me – Dan Meyer talking about how traditionally-phrased physics and maths problems tend to hinder students from working things out and grasping what is important – instead it teaches ‘learned helplessness’. Real world problems don’t come in neat little packages that you can do in a few […]
Continue readingA computer isn’t a replacement for your brain
As part of one of our research projects, one of my students has just acquired a set of tiny electrodes, set into plastic in a grid-like pattern. We’ll use this array to measure the electrical conductivity of various fluids. We don’t need 60 electrodes, about 4 would do nicely, but the particular company concerned makes the electrode arrays like […]
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