I received the latest PhysicsWorld magazine from the Institute of Physics yesterday. A quick flick through it reveals a fantastic demonstration you can do with kids (or grown-up kids) to show how strong friction can be. Take two telephone directories, and interleave the pages (so every page of book A has a page from book […]
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What makes something show on radar?
One of the questions on everyone's lips at the moment is "How does a large passenger jet simply disappear from radar without trace?" It is clearly very distressing for anyone with friends or relatives on board – not knowing what has happened. As I write this, there still seems to be a complete lack of […]
Continue readingDem Cables
I've just been shifting around various bits of equipment and computers in our 2nd and 3rd year physics lab, to make way for an item that's shifting in there from a nearby lab. It's gone something like this…(rising in semitones, with apologies to the original performers) Da power socket is connected to da extension cord; […]
Continue readingNanotechnology, asbestos and measurement
Last week I had a very interesting and useful visit to the Measurement Standards Laboratory in Lower Hutt. I went along with my summer scholarship student to discuss the measurement of electrical properties of biological tissue. While the procedure for measuring the conductivity of a piece of solid is pretty-well established, biological tissue is soft, […]
Continue readingHow big is an atom?
I 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 readingHeat and water and making nappies
In the lab, my summer student has been working on a small device to keep a small piece of equipment at a stable temperature. It uses a Peltier device – in essence it's a solid-state heat pump. Pass through current one way, and heat is drawn from the top surface to the bottom; pass current […]
Continue readingWho is doing the observing?
Last week I watched again the highly amusing film "Kitchen Stories". It's hardly a mainstream affair – in fact I feel like editing Wikipedia's meagre entry on it. The scenario is amusing because it's so ridiculous – a group of Swedish scientists is sent off to Norway to observe single men use their kitchens, in […]
Continue readingThe 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to….
….Well, what do you think? No surprises this year. Francois Englert and Peter Higgs have been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in physics for the theoretical 'discovery' of the Higgs mechanism. The citation, however, I find very interesting: for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass […]
Continue readingWhat is physics?
One of the many good education-focused talks at the NZ Institute of Physics conference last week was by Kerry Parker of Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu and the University of Otago. She described her own and her students' experiences of attending the International Young Physicists' Tournament. The tournament stretches students far beyond the confines […]
Continue readingPrecision Cosmology – Yeah, Right!
We've just had our first session at the NZ Institute of Physics Conference. The focus was on astrophysics, and we heard from Richard Easther about 'Precision Cosmology' – measuring things about the universe accurately enough to test theories and models of the universe. We ablso heard about binary stars and supernovae, and evidence for the […]
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